The honorable Mr. Chad Fowler is doing training for Ruby and Rails in London under the Skills Matter banner. Starting on February 14th and continuing all the way to the end of the year.

The Future of Web Apps is a Summit penned for London in February where people from various parts of the industry will met to talk about.. well.. The FUTURE!

And so will I, under the banner of “Happy Programming and Sustainable Productivity with Ruby on Rails”. So if you have your future groove on and a chance to do London early next year, this is a match.

lighttpd 1.4.8 has added support for multiple Rails application on a single vhost. So its less painful to have /forum and /blog under the same domain. Rockin’

So know we know what all that sexy script.aculo.us was been grown for! Thomas Fuchs has unveiled a taste of Fluxiom. It’s an asset manager that looks especially nice for keeping track of stock images, reusable graphics, and everything else that makes a creative firm spin. Very cool looking and decidedly sexy. Oh, and of course all powered by Rails.

The first Rails studio has been completed in Reston, VA. Dave and Mike report it a great success and Dave has a write-up on his blog, so does Mike. They’ll be announcing round 2 shortly.

Andreas Schwarz has set up RForum to play gateway to both Ruby and Rails. So you can create an account on ruby-forum.com and be able to post to the mailing lists through that interface. Very nifty. RForum is also an open source Rails app.

Rick Bradley has kindly shared the evaluation document that was part of the decision for picking Rails over Java for the rewrite of CenterNet. Their enterprise health care system. On top of that, Rick has started a blog to follow the project through. Right on.

Thibiant is a e-commerce site for a renowned spa in Beverly Hills, which caters to the rich and famous stars of Hollywood. And now, those very same stars will be shopping through Rails. Sergio Bayona and team from Space Dog House is behind it.

So if you’re programming Rails it’s almost like you can say that you’ve touched someone famous now!

O’Reilly’s ONJava.com had a chat with four prominent Java developers under the title of “Ruby the Rival”. Half of them has switched a big chunk of their development to Rails.

James Duncan Davidson notes about the maintainability of Rails applications and the size of the apps that can be built with it:

Can a team write a Ruby on Rails app that performs a large number of features, does it well, and is maintainable over time? Yes. No question. After working with Ruby on Rails for a while, I would be confident tackling any size web application problem with it. But, that’s because I’ve spent some time with it and now have seen that it’s possible to write a well-designed application.

Bruce Tate on what increased productivity means for organizations:

What if the productivity numbers are real? What if you really can get a 5x boost? Then, you can do the work of divisions with a department, and the work of departments with a team of two.

Do read the whole thing.

Chicago is turning into the hotbed for web-application framework development with both a majority of the Rails and Django teams in town. So we thought we’d celebrate that with a happy gathering at DePaul University on December 3rd. For chats and talks on web development using Django and Rails.

In town? Checkout the Snakes and Rubies site for preloading questions and event info.