The TextDrive guys are gathering at The Field tonight in San Diego for the RubyConf attendees that are still in town. See the announcement on the TextDrive site.

Curt Hibbs has released Instant Rails for Windows. It’s a package of everything needed to get Ruby on Rails running on Apache and MySQL. It’s nicely done as just a single directory, so it doesn’t spread itself all over the system. It’s perfect for trying out Rails in no time at all.

If you’re on OS X, you should look into Locomotive. It’s a similar system for macheads.

Curt Hibbs is continuing his long-running series of articles for O’Reilly with What is Ruby on Rails? It’s a great overview of all the frameworks in Rails and what it all means. And as typical for Hibbs’ articles, the article got us Slashdotted for the 10th time. Four of those times being of Hibbs’ credit. Congratulations!

Bruce Perens is working on model security for Active Record sponsored by Sourcelabs:

I’ve developed ModelSecurity, a new Ruby on Rails facility that helps
developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing
access control within the data model.

If you are like most developers, you think about security when you
program controllers and views. But a bug in your controller or view can
compromise the security of your application, unless your data model has
also been secured.

The economical, flexible, and extremely readable means of specifying
access controls provided by ModelSecurity makes it easier for the
developer to think about security, and makes security assumptions that
might otherwise live in one developers head concrete and communicable
to others.

Please check it out and give Bruce a hand with testing.

Two more Rails jobs ticked into my mailbox today. One with Bluebin Industries in Los Angeles, another with a new Austin-based Start-up. If you got the Rails chops and is not paying the bills with ’em, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Rick Bradley shares a great case study on how his team replaced a partial J2EE solution that wasn’t moving the team forward fast enough with Rails. Result? A 20:1 reduction in the amount of code needed to solve the problem.

And this is not Yet Another Blog, or even those luxury todo lists we do at 37signals, but a healthcare application that has to play in the regulated world of HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, drug trial requirements, and all that other heavy-duty joy.

Rails takes another step deeper into The Enterprise.

Jamis has a good run-down of the new plugin system that we’ve created for Rails. The implementation is silly simple, but its usage is powerful. The system is already driving the sharing of code internally at 37signals.

In case the public, scheduled training programs doesn’t fit your organization, consider Relevance for on-site appointments instead. Justin Gethland and team offers a wide range of packages. Including a 2-day Advanced Rails program.

Any other training offers out there we’ve missed?

Geoffrey Grosenbach has put together a Typo theme contest to get a whole bunch of cool new blog designs generated for the premiere Rails blogging engine. You can win the Rails book, a 4GB iPod nano, licensees to TextMate, and lots of other cool stuff. Make Typo pretty!

Jim Weirich has released Rake 0.6.2, which fixes the incompatibilities that earlier 0.6.x releases had with Rails. Just fire up gems and do “gem install rake” to get the latest.