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). [...]

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 [...]

Ilya Grigorik writes about the successes - so far - in using MySQLPlus with Rails 2.2's database connection pool to improve ActiveRecord's scalability.

Ben Johnson says that Authgasm is "Rails authentication done right." Check it out and see for yourself.

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 [...]

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, [...]

TechCrunch writes "131 Rails Apps Launched This Past Weekend; You Get To Vote For The Best." It's a good introduction to Rails Rumble.

InternetNews.com asks Do Ruby on Rails Developers Need Merb?

David Heinemeier Hansson has announced Rails 2.0.5, a point release of the now dated 2.0.x family. It's just a security release with two fixes.

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, [...]