News

Evan Weaver has leaped to the rescue with a hotfix (installable as a gem) for the cgi.rb DoS vulnerabilities. This hotfix is ideal for those who don't want to install Ruby or patch again. Evan's site has been having some DNS issues (related to the EveryDNS outages) so I hope he doesn't mind me repeating part of his post here:

Walter Korman has released the first version of a Yahoo! Video library for Ruby. All it takes is a gem install yahoo-video and some simple code like this:

Softies on Rails is a popular Rails blog that looks at Ruby on Rails from the perspective of .NET developers. They've just announced that they're holding a special one-day workshop where they cover how they went from .NET to Ruby on Rails for Web development and how other .NET developers can do the same.

RailsForum.com has just announced the winners of their October Tutorial Contest. A lot of cool tutorials came out of the contest, so I wanted to link to them here.

1st place - HOWTO: Make a Rails Plugin From Scratch by Danger Stevens.

2nd place - Refactoring on Rails: Move to Model and Refactoring on Rails: Multiple Scopes in Controller by Ryan Bates.

3rd place - HOWTO: Send Instant Messages in Rails

Other entries
Image uploads and resizing for Rails models with mini-magick
XSS and when h() just ain't enough
Creating Two Models in One Form
Editing Multiple Models in One Form
Test Helper: Clean, Custom Assertion Messages
Debugging on Rails: Reading Stack Traces
Introduction to Form Helpers
Programming Best Practices
Advice to Rails Beginners: Follow Conventions
Handy RJS Tips
Using Autotest with Rails on Windows XP machines
Creating Many Models in One Form
Creating a Variable Number of Models in One Form
Getting Started With RESTful Rails
Rails Migration For Beginners

Rather than spend $3049 on TextMate, the thrifty Dr. Nic Williams decided to try and port all of TextMate's useful 'snippets' over to RadRails. He has succeeded.

The winners of the Rails Day have been announced. For those who haven't heard about it before, Rails Day is an annual contest in which hundreds of developers take 24 hours to develop an application.

Merb is a micro-framework (developed by Ezra Zygmuntowicz) that ties in with Mongrel and erb and provides basic controller and view templating. It's an ideal way to put together quick and simple Web applications with Ruby that don't rely on any of the fancier features offered by Rails. It does have support for ActiveRecord, however. Merb allows you to create small systems that produce dynamic requests and can interact with databases but without the significant weight of the Rails framework. Where Ruby on Rails is a Big Mac, Merb is a McNugget.

The Rails Forum has announced a Rails Tutorial contest: