O’Reilly’s XML.com has a new article entitled REST on Rails that explores the building of a simple REST-based web service. They even finish up with a tad of meta-programming to wrap their approach nicely.

RadRails is getting company from commercial player ActiveState that has recently shipped Komodo 3.5, their IDE for dynamic languages. Komodo features support for Ruby and Rails and is available on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Komodo Professional is a $295 buy, Komodo personal is $29.95, and there’s a 21-day trial available.

The release got a bit of play in the press with an InfoWorld article called Ruby IDE is set to shine.

Being a OS X/TextMate user myself, I haven’t had a chance to checkout Komodo. Please do add your experiences in the comments for others to share.

Maik Schmidt is the contributor and maintainer of the DB2 database adapter for Active Record. He’s now also an author of Enterprise Integration with Ruby, which has just been released as a beta book under the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Learn all about how to wire enterprise and legacy systems together using Ruby, databases, LDAP, XML, sockets, HTTP, web services, Web Services™, and more. There’s a free chapter on LDAP available, you can checkout the table of contents, and of course buy the beta book in PDF for $20 or at $37.45 for a paper-when-ready + PDF combo.

Way to go Maik.

Stefan Kaes has been untiringly pushing for optimizations of Rails. Since the release of Rails 0.12.1, Stefan has lead an effort that made his own sample application no less than 4 times faster with Rails 0.14.×. Pretty impressive stuff.

Now he’s blogging about Rails performance in general at RailsExpress.blog. So be sure to subscribe to that feed if you care about a faster Rails. He already has suggestions and benchmarks up on sessions and pagination.

The Typo theme contest just got beefed up quite bit. Site 5 has offered a 15" Powerbook for the wining theme and a 12" iBook for number two. That’s on top of the truck load of other prices.

If you have any sliver of design skill in your bone, you’d be well advised to participate in this content. Oh, and the upshot is that Typo gets a legion of cool new themes out of it too. See, everybody wins!

eWEEK has another cool article on the growth of Ruby on Rails. Including comments from ActiveState and JBoss. Good stuff.

I’m guessing that the article is talking about the News.com feature today, the BBC announcement, and the fact that the Sun CEO was dropping us link love, but I’m not sure. No matter what, it’s pretty cool to get a Chinese Slashdotting.

Tyler Kovacs, CTO of Zvents, had a great segment in the DigitalLife TV episode 10 where he got to showcase his Rails application and talk about Ruby on Rails and Ajax in general. Thanks a bunch for the kind words, Tyler. It’s great to see Rails getting some TV coverage.

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Rails has gone truly mainstream by a cover story on news.com, the BBC has announced that its opening up its programme catalogue of a million shows from decades back. The framework they’re using to power this application? Ruby on Rails, baby.

Ruby on Rails chases simplicity in programming is a the title of a very positive Rails article that’s running both on News.com and on ZDNet.