We're taking a brief break from the regular "Interesting Ruby Tidbits" posts to focus on Rails™ only for a change. Rails has just made it to version 2.0 so there's been plenty of action in the community. Here are some of the highlights:

The First Rails 2.0 Screencast

I can't confirm the validity of its title, but The First Rails 2.0 Screencast is a screencast by Fabio Akita that walks through building a RESTful blog system in 30 minutes using Rails 2.0.

PeepCode Rails2 PDF (now in Spanish too!)

"Rails2" is a 58-page e-book (available in PDF format) by Ryan Daigle and published by Geoffrey Grosenbach's Peepcode that demonstrates how to use Rails 2.0's new features. A Spanish version has also now been published. It's available por solo $9 por senors y senoritas.

BackgroundFu - Background task runner plugin for Rails that isn't BackgrounDRB

BackgroundFu is a new Rails plugin that enables you to run arbitrary background / long-running tasks in relation to a Rails application. It differs from the more established BackgrounDRB by being more suitable for arbitrary, on-the-go long running tasks, rather than routine background tasks. There appear to be a number of downsides to BackgroundFu's approach, however, which are clarified in the comments associated with this post. One worth watching for the future though.

10 Ruby on Rails Plugins You Should Be Using

10 Ruby on Rails Plugins You Should Be Using is an article that pretty much covers what it says in the title. The author looks at ten different useful Rails plugins and gives a reason for their inclusion in the list. Amongst the ten are attachment_fu, white_list, Rspec and autotest.

Rendering with Erubis on Rails 2.0

In Rendering with Erubis and Rails 2.0, Eric X shows how to replace the default Erb rendering library with the faster, more powerful Erubis.

Declarative Exception-Handling in Rails 2.0

Chu Yeow demonstrates the very clean way in which you can handle controller-level exceptions in Rails 2.0.