Sake is a RubyGem by Chris Wanstrath which executes and manages system-wide Rake tasks. Whereas Rake is project-specific, Sake allows the developer to examine, install, run, and uninstall Rake files and tasks globally, much like the way Rubygems does this for Ruby libraries.
Paul Dowman has put together a feature-packed Ruby on Rails focused "appliance" for Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud - effectively an on-demand, flexible VPS service). Those who know what they're doing can try it out right away, using the AMI id: ami-4e907527.
AIR has gone Public Beta, so does anybody use it? eBay does, Adobe has more, and who doesn't love twitter?
Standout Jobs Need a Ruby Guru
Looking at the stats from the Ruby Inside Job Board, the best position, so far, got 114 applicants from Ruby Inside readers. Wow! So if you want your job to be seen by thousands of hardcore Ruby and Rails developers, consider posting. Only one new job made it to the Ruby Inside Job Board in May, but it's a good one!
Andrzej Krzywda has put together a solid, 15 point tutorial on how to build a Rails application from the ground up using Test Driven Development (TDD) techniques. This is pure gold because so few of the books and "how to build a blog in 5 minutes" type articles bother to cover testing and Andrzej shows how to get into the habit from almost the first step.
Gibberish is a Rails plugin developed by Chris Wanstrath which provides a hassle-free text translation capability for your Rails applications. The first application to use it is the Beast forum system.
A few days ago Kirk Haines announced the release of Swiftiply, an "agnostic clustering proxy for web applications that is specifically designed to support HTTP traffic from web frameworks." In particular, it's a fast, clustering proxy that uses untraditional methods to deliver a lot of dynamism, reliability and performance. Naturally, the first target for Swiftiply's benefits is Rails, in the shape of a replacement to the mongrel_rails script (merb is also directly supported).
Victor Igumnov has put together a simple walkthrough of how to package a Rails application into a single WAR file to run on a Tomcat server using JRuby, a pure Ruby PostgreSQL library (no ActiveRecord-JDBC needed!), and GoldSpike (JRuby addon that provides rake tasks to make WAR files). This is useful knowledge for anyone who might be forced into deploying Rails apps in an enterprise type system where Tomcat may be the only viable deployment option.
Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work the same online and offline (with synchronization) and with drag into and out of the application just like a standard desktop application. Check its two-minutes tutorial to get a feel of how you can make it work.
Learn on Rails has just let me know that due to a major booking pulling out, they are now making their Denver Ruby on Rails workshop free on May 17 and 18. All they ask is for a small $10 - $15 donation at the door to cover the cost of refreshments.
Only two weeks ago I linked to Courtenay's "Sample Rails App", a bare-bones Rails application featuring authentication, timezone support, and all sorts of other goodies. I'm compelled to give a small link to his newest branch, however, as it's a sample app but with full SSL (HTTPS) support. This sort of thing isn't the easiest thing to put together unless you're experienced in deployment, so I'm sure it'll come in useful to many. It comes with a lighttpd configuration file, all ready to go, along with a self-signed certificate.
I constantly get mails from various readers who are looking for Rails developers for their projects. As I don't do this myself, I have to keep giving out a list of Rails developers I know and trust or have had good feedback about. I figured I should make a blog post with a list instead, so I could point people to it, and keep it updated as a resource for everyone to use. You can even leave "review" type comments if you've used any of these guys. The list is not very long, but here we go..
