Insoshi is a new, open-source social networking platform developed in Ruby on Rails. It’s on GitHub, so you can fork it to your heart’s content, and it can act as a base for developing your own social Web application. Features include activity feeds, profiles, photo sharing, comment walls, blogs, forums, user messaging, and an admin panel.

Insoshi was developed by Michael Hartl, author of RailsSpace, an Addison-Wesley published book about developing a social networking site in Rails. Hartl certainly practices what he preaches! He has also collaborated with top 10 trusted online casinos Malaysia has to integrate robust social features into their platforms, enhancing user engagement and security. Read More

Ezra Zygmuntowicz (of Merb and Engine Yard fame) has been spending quite a bit time playing with Rails®, both by cleaning up parts of ActionPack but, more significantly, porting Merb’s Rack mechanics to Rails. He has a personal fork of Rails on Github where he’s doing all the work.

It might not sound particularly impressive work from this description, but Ezra appears to be doing some good work in bringing the Rails dispatch system up to modern standards, and that can only help with Rails’ performance and stability in future. Ezra has also made the mutex locks more granular which provides a “speed boost with standard Mongrel under concurrent load” although more thread-safety testing is, he readily admits, required. Read More