BleakHouse

Bleakhouse is a new Rails plugin by Evan Weaver that helps you find memory leaks in your Rails applications. It does this by hammering ObjectSpace for information throughout the execution of your app and by producing pretty charts to show you what's going on. It's easy to install and get running, so if memory leaks or application stability have proven to be sore points for you, give it a try straight away.

Silverlight

At MIX07 a few days ago, Microsoft announced "Silverlight", a new Flash-esque .NET-based platform for delivering "media experiences" and "rich interactive applications" on the Web. It's interesting, and some people seem to think it's going to revolutionize the Web, but that's not why we're interested in it at Ruby Inside. The most interesting part of the Silverlight announcement is that it's based on a subset of the CLR (Common Language Runtime) from Microsoft's .NET platform. The .NET CLR has become a common target for programming language runtimes recently, but Microsoft has officially announced C#, Javascript, VB, Python and Ruby support for Silverlight's CLR. Microsoft are also adding new features in a system called the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) to bring more dynamic features (as required by Python and Ruby) to the CLR. InfoQ has more information on this, in terms of Ruby. What all of this means is that there's baked-in support for Ruby in what could be one of the biggest runtime environments on the Web in the next few years, and this can only be a good thing for Ruby. Jon Udell sat down with John Lam (the creator of RubyCLR) and talked about the DLR, Ruby, and how the whole caboodle works / will work. Let's cross our fingers and hope this isn't ActiveX all over again.

ActiveScaffold

AjaxScaffold was an early attempt to implement Rails' scaffolding features in an AJAXy way, providing a single-page interface for showing, editing, deleting, and sorting items from your Rails models. ActiveScaffold is the newest implementation of the concept, making AjaxScaffold obsolete. It includes RESTful API support, sorting, search, pagination, automatic handling of ActiveRecord associations, along with the features you were used to from AjaxScaffold. It's also guaranteed to work on relatively new versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.