In Rails 3.1 it’s incredibly easy to build your application’s JavaScript using CoffeeScript, however if you fire off an AJAX request to your application you can only write your response using regular JavaScript and not CoffeeScript, at least until CoffeeBeans came along.

Why not use both fixtures and factories to make your testing in Rails easier?

Introducing CoverMe - RCov-esque code coverage for Ruby 1.9.

The APN (Apple Push Notifications) on Rails plugin has moved to a new home.

Here's why I think we should only support Ruby 1.9 with the Rails 3.0 release. http://www.metabates.com/2010/02/08/ruby-1-9-rails-3-0/

If you use, and like the apn_on_rails gem, perhaps you'd be interested in becoming it's maintainer: http://www.metabates.com/2009/12/21/apn-on-rails-needs-a-home/

My new book, Distributed Programming with Ruby, is now available on Amazon.com.

Coverage includes
• Writing robust, secure, and interactive applications using DRb—and managing its drawbacks
• Using Rinda to build applications with improved flexibility, fault tolerance, and service discovery
• Simplifying DRb service management with RingyDingy
• Utilizing Starfish to facilitate communication between distributed programs and to write MapReduce functions for processing large data sets
• Providing reliable distributed queuing with the low-overhead Starling messaging server
• Implementing comprehensive enterprise messaging with RabbitMQ and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
• Offloading heavyweight tasks with BackgrounDRb and DelayedJob

The Rails gem to help make sending push notifications to iPhones has been update to version 0.3.0. This version brings with it support for the Apple Feedback service.

Today my book, "Distributed Programming with Ruby" became available on O'Reilly's Safari. To see a more current revision of the table of contents, check out this blog post. I'd love to hear your feedback.

The alternative web framework has been upgraded to 0.8.3. Amongst the changes are effect helpers for jQuery and Prototype/Scriptaculous and Ruby 1.9 support.

The latest version of Configatron now has support for Ruby 1.8.x, Ruby 1.9.1rc1, and JRuby 1.1.6 support.

What is the fate of alternative framworks in the world of Rarb (Rails + Merb)?

Mack 0.8.2 contains bundled gems, DataMapper 0.9.7 support, ActiveRecord 2.2.2 support, and a pretty awesome implementation of deferred? actions.

Here's a simple tutorial about how to create your own instance of Configatron, and not use the global singleton.

This week the Mack Framework reached version 0.8.1. Amongst other things in the release there is now support for Portlets. Portlets allow you to build a Mack application and quickly package the ENTIRE application as a gem, and reuse it in another Mack application.

The Mack Web Application Framework now has a comprehensive, and ever growing, User Guide to help developer's make use of Mack's rich feature set. The User Guide can be found at: http://www.mackery.com/

The Mack Framework has just reached version 0.8.0. The release includes substantial feature improvements to the router, Configatron support, a new asset management system, better error handling, reporting, and logging. Plus, much more!

Configatron 2.1.4 Released: This release contains protection of already defined methods, such as object_id. Also in this release is a much improved inspect method.

Configatron has undergone a full rewrite and is now better, faster, and even easier to use than before! Check it out!

Thanks to Brandon Dimcheff for contributing a patch that let’s you call .to_hash on configatron to get your configuration settings out as a Hash.

Thanks to Simon Menke for contributing a great patch to Configatron that will automatically ‘namespace’ your configuration settings if you use the configure_from_hash or the configure_from_yaml methods.

Lot's of great bug fixes, XSS prevention support, new Session Store API, and more. Check it out!

Version 1.1.0 bring the ability to load configuration parameters from a YAML file.

Thanks to Mack user, Diogo Almeida, there is a now a forum for all things Mack. Check it out at www.mackforum.com. Sorry for the double post, but I messed up the 'href' in the last one.

Configatron makes configuring your applications and scripts incredibly easy.

Mack version 0.7.0 was released today. This release offers near-zero configuration distribution of an applications objects, routes, and views and layouts.

On August 25th, Mack 0.7.0 will be released featuring Distributed Views/Layouts and Distributed Objects (Models), along with Distributed Routes. Here's a screencast to demonstrate those features.

Mack 0.6.1.1 has been released. The release sports 38 new features and bug fixes. Included amongst the features are notifiers (email), RJS (jQuery and Prototype support), DataMapper 0.9.3 support, page caching, and a data factory for creating test data.

A few cool features that most people don't know about Mack.

Mack, the distributed Ruby web framework, has been upgraded to 0.6.0. Improvements include, DataMapper 0.9.2 support, RSpec support, transactional tests, Internationalization, and more. Enjoy!

The simple, yet extremely powerful, Ruby caching framework, Cachetastic has been upgraded to 1.7.0.

Mack 0.5.5 has been released. With a new rendering engine there is now support for Markaby and Haml.

Mack 0.5.0 was released yesterday with the much debated ORM support changes.