OStatic

The annual RailsConf just kicked off, and as usual for conferences, news of new releases is trickling out. This year's most significant changes include two new implementations of Ruby that can run Rails, a social performance-tuning application, and a new deployment scheme for larger applications.

All in all, these present a picture of a maturing Rails, readier than ever for serious use.

Although it's still listed as a beta book on the Pragmatic Bookshelf web site, Mike Clark's Advanced Rails Recipes is finished and getting ready to ship. Thanks to Pragmatic's excellent beta program for books (you get to read in-progress PDFs while the author is finishing the book), I've had plenty of time to work with this one already.

My verdict: the book is a winner, and its very existence says good things about the growing Rails community.

One of the big open source success stories of the past few years is Ruby on Rails. You can argue endlessly about the relative merits of this web framework versus others, but it's undeniable that Rails has gotten substantial marketing momentum and is an increasingly easy sell in corporate markets.

But that doesn't mean that Rails developers have turned their back on open source.