The winners of the Rails Day have been announced. For those who haven't heard about it before, Rails Day is an annual contest in which hundreds of developers take 24 hours to develop an application.

Merb is a micro-framework (developed by Ezra Zygmuntowicz) that ties in with Mongrel and erb and provides basic controller and view templating. It's an ideal way to put together quick and simple Web applications with Ruby that don't rely on any of the fancier features offered by Rails. It does have support for ActiveRecord, however. Merb allows you to create small systems that produce dynamic requests and can interact with databases but without the significant weight of the Rails framework. Where Ruby on Rails is a Big Mac, Merb is a McNugget.

Rb-AppScript is an event bridge between Ruby and OS X that allows you to get AppleScript-esque control in OS X. The Appscript creators claim Appscript is a 'serious alternative' to AppleScript and it certainly looks good. Check out this example:

Courtenay has come up with an ingenious solution to caching and precaching in Ruby on Rails with memcached. It caches data from database requests, as you'd expect, but you can also put together a special forking method that caches data in advance. Courtenay's suggestion for this is if a user does a search and you cache the initial page of search results, you could speculate the user might progress onto page two of the search, so you can get Rails to precache that data in advance so the next page load is blazing fast.

The eminent Dr. Nic Williams has put together a useful generator that makes it a lot easier to construct your own gems. It's an ideal script if you've never put a gem together before, or if you're sick of the repetition involved. Nic tells me that this tool might make its way into the core RubyGems distribution in the future, but it's worth playing with straight away.

Some user mail from Nathan Murray: