Tools

Rack, recently announced at version 0.2 by Christian Neukirchen, is a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing Ruby web applications. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.

Handshake, currently in version 0.3.0, is an informal design-by-contract system written by Brian Guthrie in pure Ruby. It's intended to allow Ruby developers to apply simple, clear constraints to their methods and classes.

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.

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.

SyntaxHighlighter is a WordPress plugin that provides code presentation and syntax highlighting features for your blog (if it's WordPress powered, naturally!). It supports a plethora of languages such as C, C++, C#, HTML, and PHP, as well as Ruby. On my blogs so far I've tended to use a homebrew approach with the Syntax gem, but this WordPress plugin should make it a whole lot easier in the future. If you're a WordPress powered blogger who likes to post code snippets, check it out.