Action Messenger, by Trejkaz Xaoza, is a basic wrapper around Ruby's xmpp4r Jabber library that makes Jabber instant messaging services directly available to Rails applications. (Jabber is an open, XML specification and framework for instant messaging. Google Talk uses it, for example.)

The indefatigable Assaf Arkin has done it again by developing a new Ruby HTML scraping toolkit, scrAPI. Peter Szinek recently wrote a popular article about scraping from Ruby using Manic Miner, RubyfulSoup, REXML, and WWW::Mechanize, but none of these are as immediately useful as scrAPI.. so why?

This library is so amazingly cool that it requires no descriptions beyond these code examples:

Geoffrey Grosenbach introduces the RaPT Plugin Manager for Rails, the answer to the problem of slow plugin installation. Installable as a gem (gem install rapt), RaPT caches the locations of different plugins so that installation is quick and easy. Future plans include developing a central plugin repository, auto-announcement of self-developed plugins, and automatic plugin upgrading. If you want the files direct, check out the Rubyforge project site for RaPT.

You can test your controllers, your models, and, well, most of your application, but till now there hasn't been a way to explicitly test your Rails application's helpers. Now there's a solution.. the helper_test plugin (with source and instructions).

New to Rails 3? Check out the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book and screencast.