If you've ever generated PDFs in Ruby before, you know that it can be both tedious and difficult using the standard go-to PDF libraries out there. Let's face it, we're web developers. Coming from HTML+CSS-based layouts, writing Ruby code for that stuff is a major pain.

Features added include a sexy query language, scopes, attr_accessible, a fancy cache key helper, a :typecast option for array/set keys, and a bajillion little improvements. Let’s run through each of them just for fun.

Developers hankering for more performance from their Rack and Rails applications are using Ruby 1.9 fibers and event-based EventMachine-driven libraries as a way to boost the performance of their applications - in opposition to scaling by merely running multiple processes or using threads.

Faye is an easy-to-use publish-subscribe messaging system based on the Bayeux protocol. It provides message servers for Node.js and Rack, and clients for use in Node and Ruby programs and in the browser.

fog is a Ruby gem by Wesley Beary to control a variety of cloud services through a unified API. It deals with both server cloud and storage based services and supports Amazon S3 and Rackspace Files; as well as servers and on Amazon EC2, Rackspace Servers, Terremark vCloud and Slicehost. Support is also available for Amazon ELB and SimpleDB.

The Public Suffix List is a cross-vendor initiative to provide an accurate list of domain name suffixes. [..] It is available for use in any software, but was originally created to meet the needs of browser manufacturers.

Giles Bowkett - Ruby Inside's Top Presenter of 2008 - contributes a guest post:

Rails can scale, but it is not inherently very good when it comes to an individual instance’s performance. While this is hopefully changing in Rails 3, I wanted to see what kind of concurrency and performance I could get out of a simple EventMachine web application. Thus, fastr was born. [..]

Fogus' recent article "clojure.rb" speculates about why there seem to be so many Ruby users adopting Clojure. As a Ruby user who adopted Clojure, I figured I'd write about my experiences.