Rails 2.1 release This week saw the release of of version 2.1 for Ruby on Rails. You can see the announcement on the official Rails blog.The new major features are: Time zones (by Geoff Buesing) Dirty tracking Gem Dependencies: Named scope (by Nick Kallen) UTC-based migrations Better caching IronRuby

Yahoo recently announced BrowserPlus, a browser-plugin based runtime that enables web applications to “break out of the browser”, and offer functionality typically reserved for desktop applications. While not entirely ready yet, a preview release of BrowserPlus demonstrates building some

Twitter is arguably the most heavily used Ruby on Rails application in the world. Almost since its inception, Twitter has fostered a wildly passionate cult following. Also from the beginning, Twitter has suffered from chronic outages under that load. In the past month, record downtime has prompted fresh

Strictly, this falls outside the 28 May – 3 June timeframe for this weekly roundup, but it’s news too big to hold off on: Railo, the alternative CFML engine, is going open source. Hat tips to Kai “Agent K” Koenig, currently kicking his heels up at Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh, and also to

I love the command line. Sure, the WIMP paradigm brought the personal computer out of obscurity and into the hands of less technical people. But if you ever need to find out what’s really going on, there’s only one answer — cast aside the pretty icons, dropdown menus, tabs and OK/Cancel

CrowdChess.com is a high profile social gaming site that has received a fair bit of media coverage lately. Well, the site is now for sale with a minimum bid of $50,000 and a Buy It Now price of $100,000. While the concept of playing chess on the computer is not new, what makes CrowdChess different is

The time for WebDU, Australia’s only web conference with a dedicated ColdFusion track, is just around the corner. The fun starts next week with workshops on the 11th of June followed by the conference itself on the 12th and 13th, at the Sydney Convention Centre. I’ll be there to cover all

The first edition was touted as the ultimate rails beginners book and read by 10’s of thousands of people. I’m pleased to announce a 2nd edition to Patrick Lenz’s brilliant book… It’s called Simply Rails 2 and is available for purchase right now in PDF or Printed format at sitepoint.com.

As a new contributor to the SitePoint blogs, I’ll be covering PHP web development, JavaScript and general web tech. When it comes to optimizing PHP for performance, there’s no end of resources available, and no end of conflicting opinions either. Everyone seems to have their own approach

At SitePoint we’re blessed with an ability to get great insight on what people think. We have a great forum, customers review our products all the time, I’ve mentioned Twitter before, there’s Google news and so on… One style of coverage that very hard to miss is when your compared

I just checked in a little project, I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. It really begun at the last Copenhagen php-meetup; Joakim Nygård and Jacob Oettinger made a presentation of their project, WebCacheGrind. I casually mentioned something about having played with the dbgp-protocol

I was possibly a little brighter eyed than many attendees this morning as I had missed the @media party in order to take my daughter to see the musical Wicked (which was very good incidentally), so arrived at the venue in good time to get front row seats for Nate Koechley’s keynote, “Professional

ColdFusion 8 is an award-winner once again - this time it’s the SIIA’s Codie Awards (hat tip to  Ben Forta). Ben also points out that UK based Software Editorial magazine has published a detailed review on ColdFusion 8 and they’re encouraging businesses to try ColdFusion out. Open

The @media 2008 conference is held in the South Bank Centre which is a wonderful location for any visitors to London. We enjoyed our morning stroll along the Thames past the London Eye to get from our hotel to the venue. The opening keynote was from Jeffrey Veen, I was pleased to actually get to his

Or does it? Throw the question “What do you think of Twitter” to a room full of geeks and you’ll soon realize that Twitter’s one of those unique creations that you either love to death or just can’t stand hearing about. There’s no fence sitting when it comes to Twitter!

It seems to me that web applications market is heading for its very own dot com-esque bust. The basic ingredients are all there, VCs investing huge amounts of money in start ups. A general air of: if you build it, they will come. Then (of course) Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft will buy it. Underlying all

Adobe have made the new Fireworks CS4 beta download available, and the good news is anyone with Fireworks CS3 — either standalone or as part of the web suites — can take it for a spin. You’ll need to have an account at Adobe and login. You’ll then be directed to the download

Today we published the second part of Corrie Haffly’s current series of Photoshop tutorials, Build Beautiful Buttons In Photoshop, Part II. As with Part I, this is an excerpt from Corrie Haffly’s book, The Photoshop Anthology, which is currently available in PDF format for FREE (that’s

Long-time no blog, eh? I am slowly climbing back into the saddle here after life got sidetracked by a combination of personal and professional issues that were consuming 27 or so hours a day. I’ll post a full .NET on the ‘Net update next week, but for now I will leave you with a round-up about a

Serve JavaScript Frameworks Faster with the Google AJAX Libraries API