OStatic

Β The annual RailsConf just kicked off, and as usual for conferences, news of new releases is trickling out. This year's most significant changes include two new implementations of Ruby that can run Rails, a social performance-tuning application, and a new deployment scheme for larger applications. All in all, these present a picture of a maturing Rails, readier than ever for serious use.

To this point, Rails has run only on the original "Matz Ruby" implementation or on the Sun-sponsored JRuby. That's changing in two important ways. First, the alternative Ruby implementation Rubinius has crossed the hurdle of running Rails applications. Second, Microsoft's .NET-based IronRuby has reached the same milestone. While neither of these implementations is yet mature enough to run a large Rails application, progress is likely to be rapid from this point. Over the long run, the Rails community will benefit from alternative implementations of Ruby, with viable alternatives on more platforms and in more circumstances.

Also of note is the release of TuneUp, a "social tuning application" from Rails performance and monitoring shop FiveRuns.Β  With TuneUp, you install a plugin in your Rails application that keeps track of what's going on, and then (when you have a question) you can post its collected data to the TuneUp web site. There other users can take a look at the details of your issue and open their own suggestions on performance tuning. While those working on proprietary applications may be hesitant to debug in the open this way, those building open-source sites will likely find it a good path to tap the collective knowledge of the community.

Finally, developers working on highly-trafficked sites who don't want to become administration experts will want to take a look at Scalr, a new release from Intridea.Β  Scalr is designed to help deploy - and scale - applications using Amazon Web Services as a backend. For $50 per month, you get a web interface to create server farms by choosing pre-built virtual machines such as database servers, web servers, and application servers. Scalr can automatically deploy new server instances based on performance metrics.

• rails
• ruby