A few days ago Kirk Haines announced the release of Swiftiply, an "agnostic clustering proxy for web applications that is specifically designed to support HTTP traffic from web frameworks." In particular, it's a fast, clustering proxy that uses untraditional methods to deliver a lot of dynamism, reliability and performance. Naturally, the first target for Swiftiply's benefits is Rails, in the shape of a replacement to the mongrel_rails script (merb is also directly supported).

Victor Igumnov has put together a simple walkthrough of how to package a Rails application into a single WAR file to run on a Tomcat server using JRuby, a pure Ruby PostgreSQL library (no ActiveRecord-JDBC needed!), and GoldSpike (JRuby addon that provides rake tasks to make WAR files). This is useful knowledge for anyone who might be forced into deploying Rails apps in an enterprise type system where Tomcat may be the only viable deployment option.

Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work the same online and offline (with synchronization) and with drag into and out of the application just like a standard desktop application. Check its two-minutes tutorial to get a feel of how you can make it work.

Erlectricity is a very early stage library in a "pre-release" stage that acts as an interoperability bridge between Ruby and Erlang processes. Scott Fleckenstein is the developer, and he is going to continue blogging about Erlectricity's development, and Ruby / Erlang interoperability on his blog. While this topic isn't quite mainstream yet, many Ruby developers have become interested in Erlang lately and Ruby / Erlang interoperability and co-operation is likely to become a big topic in the Ruby community towards the end of the year.

Learn on Rails has just let me know that due to a major booking pulling out, they are now making their Denver Ruby on Rails workshop free on May 17 and 18. All they ask is for a small $10 - $15 donation at the door to cover the cost of refreshments.