Bowline is a new MVC GUI framework for developing cross-platform desktop applications using Ruby, HTML, CSS and Javascript. The author, Alex MacCaw, aims to make building a desktop app as simple as creating a Rails site.

Chef isn't exactly new, but I've been looking into it recently after briefly talking to Lindsay Holmwood at Rails Underground.

Yep, it's the latest installment of the series of posts crammed with random Ruby links, articles, and resources:

I attended the Rails Underground conference in London at the weekend (July 24-25, 2009). As always seems to be the case at these events, I got the most value out of the more theoretical and opinion-based talks rather than 'how-to' style presentations. Having said that, Pat Allan and George Palmer gave great talks on their respective thinking_sphinx and couch_foo plugins.

In Make Your Test Suite UNCOMFORTABLY FAST! (called "the best blog post ever written" by one commenter) Jason Morrison of Thoughtbot demonstrates how to use Michael Grosser's Parallel Specs project to speed up your Ruby tests.

Like Ryan Sonnek, I've dabbled with a few different ways to run background processes in my Ruby apps, even resorting to knocking together my own (far from perfect) solution. As Ryan says on his blog, many popular libraries have complicated interfaces and don't "feel right".

François Vaux has recently published a Ruby module called Rackable which allows you to make any Ruby object Rack-friendly, providing it with a REST-like interface.

Siren is a JSON and JSONQuery interpreter for Ruby by James Coglan. Before I dive into talking about Siren, a little bit of background:

Until recently, I had been using the Curb library for making HTTP requests with Ruby, and I must say I was fairly happy with it. Phillip Toland, on the other hand, wasn't satisfied with Curb's API and the fact that it is tricky to modify (being implemented mainly in C). So, he came up with an alternative called Patron, written as much as possible in Ruby.

A couple of weeks ago we featured Gabriel Horner's Hirb framework for formatting irb output. I've recently been playing with another of his projects, Alias, which further enhances the Ruby Console experience (but it conceivably could be used in your Ruby programs too).

With people occasionally talking about "Code vs. Data", it only makes sense that you should be able process over code as you would a string. Sexp Path is a code processing tool that allows you to search over and process Ruby code in the form of S-Expressions.