Rails’ ActionMailer library can send e-mail for you, and while it can be set up to use almost any SMTP server, special requirements by Google’s GMail SMTP server have presented Rails users from taking advantage of it. Ages ago I mentioned a solution to the problem, but it involved downloading a separate application called ‘msmtp’ and performing an ugly system call from your application.

There’s a far cleaner solution, and it’s escaped my attention for almost five months now. Anatol Pomozov has written a small library using net/smtp and OpenSSL that changes some of net/smtp’s methods to allow it to directly talk to secure SMTP servers such as GMail’s. Read More

If you were in the Rails community six months ago, you might remember the Caboose Rails Documentation Project, a drive to raise $5,000 USD to spend on improving the Rails documentation. It turns out they actually ended up with $15,000 due to the overwhelming support of the community, but the process got mired in debate about what to do with the cash.

No matter, though, as things are now moving and Jamie van Dyke has been hired for one day per week to work on Rails documentation. Jamie is now looking for ideas from the community on what he should be working on specifically. Read More

Steve Odom writes about how he uses Capistrano and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud to deploy a Rails application to a fresh server within minutes. He includes the scripts and techniques he uses.

This article makes me think of the possibilities of using Pound and perhaps even a database outside of EC2 and then seamlessly deploying Rails instances within EC2 and letting Pound do the balancing. The infrastructure problem is getting easier every day it seems.

(Thanks to Robert Rasmussen for this lead) Read More