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.

Rails 0.14.x and forward contains a hefty performance increase for the MySQL adapter, but it requires that you have the latest version of the underlying, native bindings (2.7). On Stephan Kaes’ benchmark suite, the upgrade is 10-15%:

You can get the latest MySQL bindings with gem install mysql (or gem install mysql -- --include=/usr/local/lib on OS X). The additional speed upgrade will automatically kick in as soon as you have the latest bindings (to check, open the console, require ‘mysql’, puts Mysql::VERSION, and expect to see 20700).

UPDATE: If you’re on Windows, Justin Rudd went through the trouble of describing how to make it work there.

Some times you just need an outside opinion to achieve true clarity of vision. Thankfully, there’s always such an angel available when you need it the most:

Rails shows some promise but much, much more is needed. Sorry to say this but you need stored procedure support (I know that’s a sensitive subject), less coupling with the data schema, data-aware tags in XML format and more people to knock out serious bugs.

Don’t be so arrogant.

Thanks, Pearson. I don’t know how I could have somehow missed these essential features for so long. I mean, how can we expect to be taken serious before we have data-aware tags in XML format? And what is up with all that coupling with the data schema?!

Actually, I don’t think we can get that 1.0 out the door now. With this renewed vision for the true frontiers for Rails, I think we need at least a few months in the shop yet. Of course, we’ll use that time to get all those people to knock out our serious bugs.

This is indeed all for the best.

(now also available in blue)

Jon Tirsen is having fun comparing tech stacks:

Dave Thomas and Mike Clark will be playing for a full house in Reston as they deliver their first Pragmatic Studio workshop on Ruby on Rails. Congratulations, guys!

Refactoring Rails is a new site in the making by Jeremy Voorhis and Robby Russell that’ll focus on how you can make sure that “…your code is for a human first and a computer second”. Signup to be notified on launch.