The Ruby on Rails overlords have released a security patch to address a “severe” security issue which warrants a very stern warning from the developers to upgrade. The upgrade is up to Rails 1.1.5 and patches a security hole which affects versions 1.1.0-1.1.4, versions 1.0 and earlier are not affected by the security issue.

Instruction for patching:

As always, the trick is to do “gem install rails” and then either changing config/environment.rb, if you’re bound to gems, or do “rake rails:freeze:gems” if you’re freezing gems in vendor.

Read more: Mandatory Rails security patch 1.1.5

For Mac nerds, nothing is holier than the WWDC, with all those new-fangled hardware and software announcements coming straight from Jobs himself. Yesterday, we had even more reason to be excited, or at least raise an eyebrow halfway, as the boys at 37signals announced that Ruby on Rails will be shipping with the next version of OS X. Server and client will be featured on the developer’s disk included with OS X Leopard! Rails has certainly been accepted within the Mac development community and that shows, with sources inside Apple reporting Ruby and Rails’ popularity growing rapidly within Apple. More great news for the RoR guys, which I’m sure is helping them keep it real.

Read more: Ruby on Rails shipping with OS X 10.5

Ruby* is considered by some to be the best programming language on Earth. Naturally that’s just one person’s opinion and the question usually ends in some sort of argument with no end in sight. So moving on to tools, the next argument usually involves TextMate being the best text editor for Ruby (on Rails) developers, which I must admit I’m close to agreeing with (I’m still trying to let go of Text Wrangler). Regardless of which editor you use, it’s imperative that you know your way around it, in order to increase productivity and lower turn-around times. Enter stage left, Mike Clark, Rails developer-extroidanaire who’s created a very handy TextMate cheat sheet, in handy, printable PDF format, containing about 50 or so shortcuts for TextMate under OS X.

* – Edited to reflect my lack of knowledge of what a true programming language is ;)

[TextMate cheat sheet | Cheat sheet direct download]

June 17th was Rails Day 2006, an annual event where teams create new and interesting web applications in just 24 hours, using the Ruby on Rails web application framework. Recently, John from Burm.net has posted an unofficial project page, listing short descriptions and URLs to each of the projects. While his list isn’t complete, some of the projects listed still stand-out as solid web applications, albeit a little rough around the edges. We’re suckers for the social coffee “tasting” project Cuppin, although why anyone would bother taste-testing Starbucks coffee is beyond me.

[Rails Day 2006 Live Projects | Rails Day 2006]