One of the biggest benefits of bringing Merb developer Yehuda Katz on board to work on Rails 3.0 has been his relentless pursuit of extracting out all of Rails' magical abilities from their monolithic encasings and into separate, manageable chunks. A case in point is ActiveModel, a new library that provides the model related parts of ActiveRecord but without the database requirements.

Looking for a Ruby or Rails job? There are still some good ones out there. They're getting posted daily on jobs.rubynow.com but we've got 6 special ones of our own that have come in via the Ruby Inside jobs board. Jobs this month come from the United Kingdom and the US (Portland, Chicago, Birmingham and Santa Barbara) and are, as usual, Rails heavy.

Cramp ^{(GitHub repo)}is a new, asychronous evented Web app framework by Pratik Naik of 37signals (and the Rails core team). It's built around Ruby's EventMachine library and was designed to use event-driven I/O throughout - making it ideal for situations where you need to handle a large number of open connections (such as Comet systems or streaming APIs.)

Rackamole ^{(GitHub repo)} is a Rack application that lets you to monitor the interactions between users and your own Rack-based application (e.g. any Rails or Sinatra app). As well as pumping out information to the console or a log file, there's a Web interface called Wackamole to give you the skinny on your app activity.

CoffeeScript ^{(GitHub repo)} is a new programming language with a pure Ruby compiler. Creator Jeremy Ashkenas calls it "JavaScript's less ostentatious kid brother" - mostly because it compiles into JavaScript and shares most of the same constructs, but with a different, tighter syntax.

Overt humor isn't usually Ruby Inside's thing, but it's the holiday season, so there's nothing wrong with kicking up your heels and having a little fun. Don't worry - this won't become a habit. Promise! After the fold, check out a chart showing how programming language fanboys (Ruby's included) see each other's respective languages.

Friendly is a new Ruby ORM (a la ActiveRecord) that lets you easily use NoSQL ideas on regular database engines, such as MySQL. Developer James Golick has written a blog post introducing Friendly that goes into detail on how it works - with code examples. Effectively you get schema-less, document-like storage (with indexes!) but based around MySQL.

Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition developers Ninh "Hernandez" Bui and Hongli Lai travelled to San Francisco last week and gave a 35 minute Google Tech Talk called Building A More Efficient Ruby Interpreter.

I love checking out new Ruby libraries, and recently many new ones have passed my eyes. The most prominent releases get their own post on Ruby Inside, but often there are less significant libraries that I'd struggle to write 100 words about yet still contribute to Ruby's lifeblood. This post aims to round up a selection of my recent discoveries.

It's long been a bone of contention in the Ruby world that Ruby, as a programming language, doesn't have an official spec (though RubySpec has been a noble, community effort to build an executable specification for Ruby). Now, though, there's a draft, official Ruby specification available for you to check out- based on Ruby 1.8.7 (which some aren't happy about).

Uh oh, it's upgrade time again. Today, the official Ruby 1.9 maintainer (Yuki Sonoda, a.k.a. Yugui) announced a heap overflow vulnerability in Ruby 1.9.1 and, subsequently, the release of Ruby 1.9.1-p376 (patch level 376). As the current production level release of Ruby, this is a crucial upgrade - unless you're still using Ruby 1.8.x, which isn't affected at all.

Much of Merb's momentum has been merged into Rails 3, but one-time Engine Yard developer Daniel Neighman has found himself moving in a new direction, inspired by what they had once achieved with Merb Slices. Since then, he's taken fully-mountable Rack applications to the extreme in creating Pancake, a tool & framework to let you stack and loosely couple Rack-based webapps.