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Apache fans in the Ruby community were delighted several months ago, when Phusion released Passenger, an Apache module for deploying Rails applications. I have been working with Passenger over the last few weeks, and am pleased to report that the module is extremely easy to install, use, and configure. Passenger has succeeded in bringing me back into the world of Apache after several years of wandering in the HTTP server desert.

When you're working with a commercial software company, it's easy to keep up with their latest news: Between the company's Web sites, e-mail newsletters, conferences, and (increasingly) blogs, you can find out what is happening, and prepare yourself accordingly. Life in the open-source world is quite a bit messier, of course, in that there often isn't any central location or source for news. One of the key tools that the open-source community uses to keep in touch is blogs -- but it's not always easy to find all of the blogs on the subjects that interest you. That's where blog planets come in, providing a one-stop aggregation of many blogs on a particular subject.

For years, you could tell the hottest open-source projects by the number of programmers on an e-mail list, or by the number of books published. Increasingly, though, the hottest projects are those around whom service-oriented businesses are being formed. Yesterday, Ruby on Rails hosting company Engine Yard received a $15 million series B round from NEA, Amazon, and Benchmark. This follows an earlier $3.5 million round in January of this year.

Insoshi, released yesterday as an open-source framework for creating social networks, represents another step forward not just for open source software, but also for the commoditization of what used to be difficult-to-implement, proprietary technologies.

With Insoshi (and other frameworks, such as Lovd by Less), anyone can create a social network on his or her own server.

Upgrades in the world of commercial software are typically forced upon users, and often contain unpleasant surprises. Users of open-source languages, databases, operating systems, and applications can't be forced to upgrade, and there is no financial incentive for the developers to get everyone to use the same version.

We look at several popular open-source languages and tools, to understand just how upgrades and compatibility are ensured in a world of open options.

Want a complete, printed reference for Rails that dedicates a separate chapter to each topic? Look no further than The Rails Way, a new book by Obie Fernandez.

Ruby on Rails is one of the best-known open-source Web frameworks currently in use. It combines the Ruby language with an MVC (model-view-controller) architecture, a powerful object-relational mapper known as ActiveRecord.

Have you hit a brick wall when working with Ruby on Rails? Do you want to understand what is going on behind the scenes in your Rails application? Are you looking to squeeze the best possible speed out of your Rails apps? Advanced Rails might well be the book you're looking for.

Ruby on Rails has become, over the last few years, the latest hit among Web application developers. While it is often compared with Perl, PHP, and Java, Rails is not a programming language.οΎ