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Charles Nutter says:

Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora have put together a concise, to the point, Ruby on Rails Security Guide that looks at how to tackle security issues in your authentication system, models, controllers, views, and elsewhere. Lots of links, lots of tips, and a must-read for anyone who's not feeling 100% confident in the security of their Rails app.

Serving PDFs with Rails using Inkscape Satya X has written "Serving PDFs with Rails using Inkscape," an article that goes into amazing detail about how to set up a system where customized PDFs can be created and served from a Rails application (or any Ruby app, with amendments). Ever wanted to set up your own Pragmatic Programmers'-esque PDF stamping system for selling e-books? Now you can do it for free. Ruby on Rails vs DJ AngoThe RailsEnvy guys are at it again with another Rails vs X "commercial." This time it's Ruby on Rails vs Django.. with stellar hip hop beats.Ruby On The iPhone?Giles Bowkett writes with news that "Ruby runs on the iPhone" and presents these two sites as evidence (see ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz on the second). Giles has no iPhone, and nor do I, so we can't test it, but for those of you with such a device, it might be do-able. Please add any reports regarding iPhone Ruby operability as comments here.SOAP4RNever gotten familiar with Ruby's abilities with SOAP? Mark Thomas has put together a really tight beginner's tutorial to the SOAP4R library.Rubinius SprintLast week, the team behind Rubinius - one of many promising attempts at creating a new Ruby implementation - had a major development sprint. Lots of things got done, and Charles Nutter (of JRuby fame) even dropped in to help. Along with the rest of the Ruby community, we want to cheer on Rubinius and look forward to reporting on its beta releases in the near-future (hopefully!).

(image credit: energymech - a cool C-powered bot)

Anvil is a new Ruby framework for developing GUI applications by Lance Carlson. It's a framework around Wx::Ruby (WxWidgets is a popular cross-platform widget toolkit) and offers its own DSL to make developing GUI applications easy. The release blog post has more information, including a great example of the code required to make a basic Anvil app. Interestingly it supports an MVC style of development where the view and control elements of your applications can be separated cleanly.

Welcome to the first "Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don't Warrant Separate Posts"! This is going to be a somewhat regular feature of all the reasonably interesting things I'm e-mailed about or discover that aren't getting as much attention as they should, but which aren't captivating enough to warrant an entire post on their own. So without further ado..thread-dump librarythread-dump is an interesting library that lets you to get a dump of thread activity when a Ruby process quits by Greg Fodor. In his own words:

(credit: image source)

I know there's going to be some controversy around this clever piece of code by Jay Phillips. He's developed "Superators", a library that finally makes it easy to create new operators within Ruby that look like line noise. Always wanted a "-~+~-" or "===~-+~++" operator? Now it's within your grasp! As Aleks Clark says: "Job security and spiffy DSL construction in one neat package."

Charlie Savage, author of ruby-prof, recently baked in support for Rails to ruby-prof, so now it's possible to profile your Rails application, see where the delays are, and work on improving performance.