
Yehuda Katz explains Merb
In this interview from RubyFringe, Yehuda Katz talks about Merb, its design principles, and how it differs from Rails. Yehuda also mentions Yard, an RDoc replacement.

In this interview from RubyFringe, Yehuda Katz talks about Merb, its design principles, and how it differs from Rails. Yehuda also mentions Yard, an RDoc replacement.
New Relic announced the availability of RPM 1.2 which goes a long way into making the job of the developer better with improved collaboration and integration.
Big news for Ruby web frameworks: Merb and Rails will be merged in Rails 3.0. The merge will bring some of Merb's characteristics to Rails: a defined public API, ability to run a barebones version rails-core (like merb-core) with further functionality available in the form of plugins, performance improvements and more.
NewRelic announced a cooperation with the Rails Core team to improve Rails performance. An opt-in feature allows to make performance data available to the Rails Core team, which can use it to figure out Rails bottlenecks in real world Rails apps. Also: FiveRuns' TuneUp performance monitoring tools now supports Merb.
NewRelic now offers their Rails performance monitoring (RPM) Lite product free of charge for all Rails users. A host of new features were added to the various commercial versions of RPM.

The MOle, so named because it acts as the investigators agent, is a plugin that provides insight into the inner workings of Ruby on Rails in realtime, as requests come in and get processed. The author describes how the plugin came about and gives InfoQ readers a detailed introduction to his innovative plugin.

As the problem domain of your Rails applications expands, you may need to run computationally intensive or long running background tasks. How can you run these long background tasks without your web server timing out? And how do you display the progress to your users?

In this presentation from QCon SF 2007, Justin Gehtland explains two open solutions to distributed identity and their Rails integration components: the OpenID system (using ruby-openid) and CAS (using rubycas-client).

Dr. JamesAdam has been an active member of the Ruby community for more than four years, contributing to a number of projects including the FXRuby GUI toolkit and the Ruby-OpenGL bindings. InfoQ interviews James about his pioneering work with Rails Engines, the Rails plugin system and what it's like to be doing heavy Ruby development in enterprise settings.