I just happened across the Passenger website. Passenger claims to provide “Easy and robust deployment of Ruby on Rails applications on Apache webservers.” The metric graphs show it performing as well as Mongrel and Thin. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in community and the... read more

A few weeks ago I stumbled across Heroku, an online IDE for instant Rails development. It provides editing, sharing, and collaborating of projects, as well as the ability to import and export projects. Heroku is an amazing implementation of technology and innovative in so many ways. Even if you’re... read more

Fabio Akita (not **the** Fabio) has an excellent interview with Adrian Holovaty, creator of the Django Framework. I’ve been following Akita’s work for some time and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Recently he reproduced the original Rails screencast, to update it. I also enjoyed his two-part interview with Avi Bryant.... read more

Mike Clark just announced the release of his new Beta book Advanced Rails Recipes. Although it is a beta book, it already contains 42 recipes, and by the time the book is complete there should be 70+ available. Unlike the first Rails Recipes book, written primarily... read more

Bob Follek wrote an interesting post asking the question Why The h Can’t Rails Escape HTML Automatically?. As many of you know, Django recently introduced an enhancement that automatically auto-escapes all template variables. It’s a very elegant solution and something that I’m really excited about. (Although I could do... read more

The Beast is getting green eggs and spam ... read more

There’s been some buzz lately about Hobo, a plugin extension to the Rails framework that makes it easy to do rapid prototyping of web applications. You can find out about all of the features at the HoboCentral website. One exciting feature is the implementation of DRYML, a way of... read more

I was trying to spec out a few of my controllers that had actions on them requiring authentication. After jumping through many mind hoops to figure out how to stub them out properly I asked the RSpec-Users list and received this solution from Graeme Nelson: def mock_user_authentication(allow_user_to_pass=true) ... read more

Ryan Bates provides an excellent collection of Ruby on Rails screencasts for free. If you have a couple of minutes, literally, please check out what he’s put together. Some time ago I had envisioned producing something similar, but in no way could I have even come close to this.... read more

The fine folks developing Slate, a content management system for Rails, have just released a Textile Editor plugin. This works well in conjunction with Err the Blog’s acts_as_textiled plugin. ... read more