Today Phusion has announced the release of Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) 1.8.7 (more specifically, 1.8.7-20090928). Once considered a bit of a joke, given the name, REE has proven itself to be anything but, with significant memory usage and speed improvements over the stock "MRI" Ruby implementation (achieved by way of patches to the MRI code). The key development with this release is compatibility with Ruby 1.8.7, rather than the 1.8.6 of previous versions.

A couple of weeks ago, popular micro-blogging service Twitter unveiled a beta "streaming API." Twitter's nature means they get hammered with polling requests so they've begun to experiment with the concept of streaming relevant data within a single HTTP request (in a Comet style). TweetStream (or GitHub repo) is a new Ruby library by Michael Bleigh to handle interacting with Twitter streams from Ruby.

Watchr is a continuous-testing tool by Martin Aumont in the vein of Autotest (part of the ZenTest package).

Learnivore is a new(ish) site by French Rubyist Thibaut Barrère that aims to aggregate all of the best screencasts in any easy to navigate, searchable manner. Learnivore is worth following (you can even follow it on Twitter) because unlike blog posts, screencasts from disparate sources haven't really been specifically indexed and presented well before.

Wanted to go to JRubyConf or RubyConf this year? Tough - they're sold out already. Luckily, though, there are some interesting upcoming events that you can still get in to - some online, some in multiple cities, some held in youth centers, some in hotels, and even one on a tropical island. Whew!

Create Your Own Programming Language is a interesting new information product and community by Marc-André Cournoyer (of Thin fame) that promises to teach you how to create a simple programming language. The official site is well worth checking out, even if you don't want to buy it, as it's a great example of how to sell a product like this. Create Your Own Programming Language costs $39.99 and has a two month money back guarantee.

Evan Light has recently pushed his Coulda project to Github - it's a test framework based on Test::Unit, inspired by Cucumber, Shoulda and Thor.

Looking for a Ruby/Rails job in Texas, California, Florida, Illinois, or Texas? We might have want you want in this post. This is perhaps the most diverse set of states featured in a Ruby Inside job post - usually it's just California and New York! It seems Ruby and Rails are now finding a full-time billing in a whole new set of companies.

Welcome to the latest in the series of random Ruby related links I've picked up over the past few weeks. It's a crazy grab-bag of links this time around! Whatever your job, interest, or fetish, there's bound to be something in here that tickles your fancy if you're a Rubyist. Enjoy!

I've been reading the Merb Way by Foy Savas (Addison Wesley).  I was a little sceptical about this book at first, because of the recent marriage of the Merb and Rails core teams and the announcement that the Merb codebase would be merged with Rails as part of the march towards Rails 3. As Yehuda Katz put it, "Merb 2 is Rails 3".

Ruby5 is a new twice weekly podcast dedicated to Ruby and Rails news. It's headed by Gregg Pollack (formerly of the RailsEnvy podcast which Jason Seifer has now taken over) and Nathan Bibler. They aim to cover several bits of Ruby and Rails news in five minutes. You can also leave comments about the stories on their site as you listen. As of today, there are 7 episodes in the archives if you want to catch up, all in the 5-6 minute range.

Try Ruby was a Web site by Why The Lucky Stiff that provided a Web-based version of irb (the interactive ruby prompt) and a 15 minute tutorial for people to learn and play with Ruby. With Why's disappearance, however, the site went down and an invaluable Ruby community resource was lost.