Bruce Williams has a great set of articles going on on his blog called "Rails Views". Each one looks at a different aspect of Rails' views and templates system and how you can use it in a cool or different way. You are bound to learn something or come up with some ideas on how to make your views more efficient (I sure have!). Here are some of the recent posts in the series:

Kevin Clark looked at his options for testing his RJS (Javascript templates for Rails) templates but wasn't happy with the limited options, so he rolled his own testing system as a Rails plugin. It's called ARTS (Another RJS Testing System) and is available here. It's pretty neat, and if your app uses a lot of RJS templates, you're going to want it. Here's an example of a test using ARTS:

Tobias Lütke needed to migrate a database from one architecture to another but needed to copy the data across intact. To ensure that the format would be architecture agnostic, he's created a plugin that dumps the data to YAML and then reloads it back into the database at the other end. It's a simple rake task, and Tobi gives quick and easy instructions.

Rodney, the Pin Up Geek, has set out to demystify the routing system in Ruby on Rails. He provides lots of basic code examples and shows you how to use most of the features of routes, like in this example of a requirements based route that only routes when a postal code is included in the URL:

People who are considering Rails as a platform often ask what it's integration with tools like HTTP authentication are like, often because that's the way they're currently solving certain problems. Up till now HTTP authentication has been something you've had to implement yourself, but now there's a plugin. Install it like so:

Simon Harris laments:

InternetNews.com have a story called "A Gem Of A Language for Java and .Net" where they look at two attempts to get Ruby working on the Java and .Net runtimes. A choice quote:

GemJack.com is a basic, but highly effective, site featuring full HTML documentation for most of the Ruby gems (Ruby's library packaging system). Hopefully it'll get indexed by Google in full and beginners will find it easier to find the documentation they want straight from Google.

Jeremy Voorhis has written an interesting, and seemingly overlooked, article about asset management in Ruby and Rails. Firstly he talks about using rake to build a basic asset compiler, and then demonstrates a basic DSL (Domain Specific Language) he created to manipulate image assets in only a few lines of code. An example:

For the fun of it, I developed a quick Ruby obfuscation tool a few weeks ago. It's not a proper obfuscater that changes variable names and such, but it'll keep your code from being immediately understood. Here's the library, px.rb:

An anonymous commenter contributed a cute Ruby example on this post talking about Java's verbosity. The original poster lamented on how much code you have to write to create some basic accessors on a Java class.

New to Rails 3? Check out the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book and screencast.