Just two months ago, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer of the Rails Envy podcast launched Envy Casts, a micro-publisher in the Rails scene. In anticipation of the release of Rails 2.2, they've released both a Ruby on Rails 2.2 Screencast and a Ruby on Rails 2.2 PDF (written by Carlos Brando; translated by Carl Youngblood). They're $9 each, or $16 as a package deal for the two. Reviews follow:

The Screencast

The screencast is a 44 minute audiovisual extravaganza that demonstrates most of the significant new features in Rails 2.2. I discovered a lot of stuff I didn't know about, and while Gregg and Jason were still as entertaining as in their first screencast, they've toned it down a little and focus more on the content this time around.

The diagrams and code examples are great and I found the format to be well suited for learning the material. If you really want it all to sink in, you can watch the screencast at the same time as using their supplied code samples (supplied in a separate file), as otherwise you get blinded by all of the cool new features and then need to rewatch it anyway!

In conclusion, this screencast is an awesome resource for getting up to speed with many of Rails 2.2's improvements (though, significantly, internationalization is barely covered). Unless you're a die-hard follower of the commits on edge Rails, however, you're going to pick up a whole ton of tricks and ideas from this video.

The PDF

The Ruby on Rails 2.2 PDF is a DRM-free PDF e-book that walks through all of the new Rails 2.2 features, along with a code example or two for each.

Clocking in at 118 pages (landscape), the main bulk of the PDF spans 80 pages of step by step feature summaries of the changes to ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, ActiveResource, ActionPack, ActionMailer, and Railties. There's also a chapter on the Internationalization (i18n) features and one covering a few new performance features. Added to this are two laundry-list like chapters covering the "Bugs and Fixes" in Rails 2.2 and the obligatory "CHANGELOG."

The main chapters of the book, summarizing the new features along with code examples, are good, and possibly worth the price of entry, although I find the PDF format (for this sort of content) and the landscape orientation cumbersome. I'd prefer a more accessible format. The writing is solid and succinct though, and the code examples are as good as you'd expect.

Mike Gunderloy has written an excellent thirteen step guide to contributing to Rails - step by step. He covers:

• Getting Git
• Checking out the Rails source code
• Setting up and running the tests that come with Rails (so you can check that your code doesn't bust Rails)
• Forking Rails (for doing your changes)
• Updating Rails with the changes in your fork
• Creating a patch
• Getting on to Lighthouse (the ticket system that Rails uses)
• Creating a ticket

If you haven't contributed code to Rails yet because the process seems daunting (or that it changes on an annual basis), Mike's guide should reassure you on how to go about it.

As an aside, Mike will shortly be coming aboard on Rails Inside, so keep an eye out for more excellent content from him, both right here at Rails Inside and on his personal Rails-focused blog - A Fresh Cup.

Post supported by RichAppsConsulting: Are you looking for an Agile web 2.0 company to develop your company's website quickly and professionally? At RAC, we have a highly trained staff of developers who are experts in Rails, Flex and PHP development. We can develop solutions for your company with your budget and timeline in mind. We pride ourselves on having superior Rails programming skills the and striving for continuous improvement. For more information, call our office at 202.470.6683 or email us at contact@richappsconsulting.com.

Today, David Heinemeier Hansson has announced the release of the first "Release Candidate" of Rails 2.2. Mike Gunderloy has put together a remarkable page listing all of the key changes individually. They include:

• Internationalization
• Significant Ruby 1.9 and JRuby compatability improvements
• HTTP ETag support
• Thread safety
• Transactional migrations
• Database connection pooling
• Memoization
• and, naturally, a lot more..

The Release Candiate's primary function is to allow people to test Rails 2.2 itself, as well as to get their applications up to scratch for the final Rails 2.2 release. Installation is quick and simple with gem install rails -s http://gems.rubyonrails.org -v 2.2.0

Go get 'em!

Vasco (Github repository) is a "route explorer" for Rails developed by Relevance, Inc and released under an MIT license. Effectively it provides a Web-based UI to explore the RESTful routes configured for your Rails app. It installs as a plugin.

With Vasco, you can perform GETs, POSTs, PUTs, and DELETE HTTP operations upon your RESTful controllers, and see what's sent and returned.

Supported by: ActionGear is a menu-bar app for task management on your Mac. It's lightweight, quick, and helps you get stuff done. Try it out for free.

Hot off the back of the Rails Guides hackfest came a lot of great new Rails documentation. Now joining that documentation comes an all new Ruby on Rails Security Guide. Clocking in at almost 11,000 words, the guide covers RJS injection, cookie store session replay attacks, session hijacking, File upload security, mass assignment of attributes, CAPTCHAs, SQL injection, and more.

The Ruby on Rails Security Project blog has also begun to update a bit more, so if Rails' security is of prime importance to you, get over there too, and perhaps even the Ruby on Rails Security group on Google Groups.

Support from: 1st Easy offers UK Rails hosting (dedicated and shared) running Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and LAMP stack. If you want to get to know us first, or simply want to evaluate the performance of your Rails applications running on Passenger, we'll arrange a trial hosting account for you (full technical support included!)