Avi Bryant is the creator of Seaside, the Smalltalk web-framework built on continuations, that has been shining light on alternatives to traditional MVC- and request/response-based frameworks. I heartily recommend taking a look. It might not fit your brain (it didn’t mine), but its sure to expand it.

Now Avi has been interviewed by Geoffrey Grosenbach for the Rails Podcast. (Unfortunately, the audio is pretty grainy.. hang in there for the first few minutes).

Mike Clark declares his love for SwitchTower, the distributed deployment manager built for Ruby on Rails. He shows off a few fancy tricks in the love letter, such as how to turn web access on and off when you go down for upgrades.

I’m with Mike on this lovefest. I couldn’t imagine operating the 37signals cluster without it. Jamis Buck deserves another round of applause for this fantastic piece of software.

Considering that TextMate is the defacto standard for Rails development on OS X, I thought you might all like to know that there’s now a real manual available for it. Explaining all about how you can make snippets, macros, and the rest of that sexy stuff you see sprinkled all over the Rails screencasts.

If you’re running a Ruby on Rails application on a shared host, it’s super-double-plus recommended to freeze your Rails. Freezing your Rails means putting the framework into vendor/rails instead of floating with whatever gems that are installed on the host. Because if you do so, you’ll automatically be upgraded when they are. Not a great thing for a production application to have forced upon itself.

The great news is that this is silly simple. If you’re running 0.14.x or newer, you can simple do rake freeze_gems, and the current gems the system is used are unpacked into vendor/rails. Now the host can update as silly as it wants without affecting your application.

We’ve been receiving various reports of intermittent errors while running Rails applications and regular Ruby stuff that goes something like this: “undefined method ‘include?’ for -517611318:Fixnum”.

It appears that this might be a problem with GCC 4.0-compilations of Ruby. Most platforms are still using GCC 3.3, so they don’t see the problem. But on OS X, GCC 4.0 is now default if you’ve installed the recent Xcode. To switch back to GCC 3.3, do: sudo gcc_select 3.3 and then recompile Ruby.

We’ve love to get more reports and evidence on what exactly the problem is. Perhaps we can get it fixed in time for Ruby 1.8.4. Please use the comments.

The release of Ruby 1.8.4 is drawing close. We’d love to be compatible out the gates, so please do help by testing your application with the latest preview. RedHanded has instructions on how to go about the compilation.

Rick Olson has a great service running for people with questions about Rails development. The site is called Rails Weenie and allows you to ask questions to the community in a weblog-style fashion and then receive responses as comments. There’s already a lot of good content on there.

IBM’s developerWorks has a new article on how you can do automate acceptance tests with Selenium against a Ruby on Rails application.

GodBit has an interview with Scott Raymond about his use of Ruby on Rails in Blinksale and IconBuffet. I particularly enjoyed this bit about the opinionated software:

If you pay attention when you’re using Rails, you can hear its authorial voice. The Rails community calls the notion “opinionated software,” and people either love it or hate it. I love it. For me, working on Rails is sort of like having really smart, like-minded coworkers. It is inspiring, motivating and energizing.

Obie Fernandez has a great story on how ThoughtWorks recently won a $800,000 bid for a critical application against another consultancy. They probably do that all the time, but the interesting part about this particular bid is that they made it powered by Ruby on Rails. The other consultancy bid a million dollars for a Java-based system, but the CIO picked the Rails solution from ThoughtWorks.

So saving $200,000 was obviously a big advantage of the Rails bid, but more interesting is the second-level concerns. Obie writes:

Analysts from Gartner and Forrester and even members of his personal grapevine are all abuzz about Ruby… Ruby may not be a corporate standard (yet), but don’t even get him started on his organization’s dismal track record building J2EE applications… The risk of late delivery is much, much scarier to him than proceeding with a relatively unproven technology that the whole world seems to be talking about as the successor to Java.

This story comes hot on the heels of Stuart Halloway’s exposure of how Rails makes it possible for his consultancy to win accounts over Java solutions due to higher productivity. As he put it:

Developers have more fun, make more money, and customers get better products cheaper and faster.

Indeed.

UPDATE: The story is indeed “fictional”, but with the very deep underlining of “inspired by real events”. Obie has no permission to speak on specific deals of ThoughtWorks, so names have been withheld to protect the real involved parties and the exact figures, estimates, and so on.