Bob Silva presents a rundown of some new features due in Rails 1.2. These minor features are in addition to the full REST support and ActiveResource (supposedly not just yet), as previously covered by a multitude of blogs.

Josh Catone looks at the results of SitePoint's State of Web Development 2006 survey. Josh says:

Chris Wanstrath has put together an excellent guide to sessions in Ruby on Rails. He covers a whole ton of gotchas and features that I'd never known about before. Did you know that if you specify session :off in your application.rb that session can still be created automatically in certain situations? If not, check it out, there's a lot of great information.

The 'Unofficial Ruby on Rails Blog' has put together a great article about how to install Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and RMagick on Windows. It gives the ideal places to download each part from in order to avoid nasty errors, and should act as a good resource for any Windows-based developers to set up their environment.

Eric Hodel has put together a great guide to optimizing Ruby code with RubyInline and ruby-prof, a code profiler.

Johnny of Johnny's Thoughts has put together a brief article / tutorial about implementing full text search with tagging in a Ruby on Rails application. He uses Ferret, a Ruby port of Lucene, the acts_as_ferret Rails plugin, and ActsAsTaggable.

Eric Hodel has worked out a scary way to reduce Ruby's safe-level on the fly using a little inline C. Please don't use this in production code, it's just an experiment! That said, this could be a useful trick for things like Classroom and sandboxing environments.

def foo
  'bar'
end

module M
  def foo
    'baz'
  end
end

puts "should be 'bar': #{foo}"

self.dup.instance_eval do
  extend(M)
  puts "should be 'baz': #{foo}"
end

puts "should be 'bar': #{foo}"

Garry Dolley worked out some interesting Ruby-fu to create a temporary execution context on the fly using self.dup.instance_eval. Any other tricks we could use this for?

On the back of Kevin Clark's "Things You Shouldn't Be Doing in Rails", Geoffrey Grosenbach has created a plugin called 'deprecated' that, with a single rake task, will alert you to all of the old and deprecated code in your application. This is perfect for bringing those old applications up to date and will help you catch all of the changes necessary, such as using flash and session instead of @flash and @session, etc.