intertwingly

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition beta 5 is now available.  While I have been fixing the trivial and egregious errata all along, my previous focus on completing the book meant that I had built up a backlog of non-trivial but non-showstopping errata.  This past week or so has been a sprint to address this backlog.  The current list is much more manageable, consisting mostly of errors that I have yet to be able to reproduce, issues where users have found they need to restart the server, and formatting issues and production mechanics that typically are handled later in the cycle.

The people who have participated in the beta have been tremendous, and the forums have been quite active.

Meanwhile, I’ve converted all of my personal Rails apps to Phusion Passenger.  I do all of my testing of the apps in the book using straight ruby script/server, and the conflicts over port 3000 got too annoying.  This Railscast closely matches how I’m set up.  Effectively, it means that the applications all require different virtual hosts, but otherwise share port 80.  The applications themselves are loaded on demand, and unloaded when not in use.  All of which is a big win for me.  As I’m not worried about the scalability of these apps, I’m running most of them with RailsEnv development.