At the opening keynote here at RailsConf in Chicago Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmer fame) presented three problems for the Rails community to solve. His idea was that these would help Rails become more popular in organizations. I would like to add two more: a SOAP library and an improved MSSQL-server driver. Judging from the amount of Microsoft-bashing going on here I would venture to guess that these aren’t on the top of the list for most Rails developers....

Philip Su from Microsoft gives us a glimpse of the inner workings of one of the most complex software projects in the world. It is interesting to see that the same problems that sometimes plague small waterfall projects (lies, red tape) exist in an organization that have put a lot of effort into their development methodology. At a recent Scrum training session Ken Schwaber said “it’s all bout telling the truth”....

Ruby on Rails includes some options for handling sessions (see overview by Stefan Kaes (PDF)). Unfortunately the default ActiveRecord session handler is relatively slow which may have a big impact on your application (sessions tend to accumulate quickly). Fortunately for all of us, Stefan has created an alternative MySQL session handler whith hard coded SQL statements. His version is much quicker. If your application uses the standard session handler there is really no reason not to implement Stefan’s solution....

Update: This code has been integrated and greatly enhanced in the rexchange project by Sam Smoot. Update 2: iCal in Lion supports Exchange and none of this should be required anymore. Having recently recieved a brand new MacBook Pro from my employer I needed to get basic things such as mail and calendaring working. We use Microsoft Exchange 2003 which is great if everyone is using Outlook. Since I work with various clients I am subjected to their respective firewall policy which typically only allows HTTP(S) traffic....

PAAKT is a Pyhon module with which you can analyze accessibility in web pages. This release is to enable testing of real web pages (instead of the fake ones in the unit tests). For details see the PAAKT project page.

Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry (of MIT fame) and Casey Reas (UCLA Design). From the processing.org web page: Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain. I have been dabbling with it for a while and have come to like it’s simplicity....

Update: There is now a nice demo of how selenium on rails works. Jonas Bengtsson has created an initial version of a Selenium plugin for RoR. I have been using Selenium for a while now and this certainly looks promising. There are some minor details in this release that need to be fixed such as coloring of completed test actions and test cases (mine are not highlighted). A nice addition would be if RadRails supported code completion of selenium actions....

John Lam has created an initial version of RubyCLR which allows you to use Ruby through the .NET CLR. Although there is no support for generics or marshaling of user-defined value types it is still a very interesting release. Microsoft will undoubtedly monitor his progress closely. Maybe he will go the same way as Jim Hugunin who created IronPython and then joined Microsoft’s CLR team.

If you are using RadRails when developing your Ruby in Rails applications you will be interested in increasing performance. Christian Pelczarski has an interesting instruction on how you can boost performance of the Eclipse/RadRails combo by switching to the latest Sun JVM (version 6.0) for Windows XP. You can usually get some extra performance by setting the initial heap size and the max heapsize to the same, thus bypassing the dynamic growing/shrinking of the heap....

Selenium (by Thoughtworks) is on open source tool for automated functional tests. It’s simplicity makes it an excellent candidate for introducing automated functional testing in your project. (Hi! This article is now several years old and updates may have changed how Selenium works) Setting it up for an ASP.NET application is done in a few simple steps: Download Selenium (choose the full install). Create a folder “selenium” in your web site root folder....