The newest version of Ruby in Steel, a Microsoft Visual Studio-based IDE for Ruby on Rails, is now available from SapphireSteel Software. The new 1.5 developer version supports integrated edit-and-run capabilities for Ruby 1.8.x, Ruby 1.9.x, and JRuby 1.4. Along with many improvements to IntelliSense and the product's debuggers, Cylon and JCylon, Ruby in Steel has also dropped its support for IronRuby.

One of the most talked about features in Rails 3 is its plug & play architecture with various frameworks like Datamapper in place of ActiveRecord for the ORM or jQuery for javascript. However, I've yet to see much info on how to actually do this with the javascript framework.

Last fall, I heard about Riak and thought it sounded awesome, and it boasts a lot of neat features that I’ll go into detail about below. I was further impressed when I met the Basho team at nosqleast in Atlanta. They really seem to know what they’re doing.

Check out how elegant blocks and closures and their first-class support in ruby can make our codes.