Slick, gotta love sodoku:
Sudoku Solver

Plugins are really the way to go.

5 Reasons your next rails mod should be a plugin

Loose Coupling with SOA

"In technical systems, loose coupling carries an overhead - not just an operational overhead, but a design and governance overhead. Small-grained services may give you greater decoupling, but only if you have the management capability to coordinate them effectively. In sociotechnical systems, fragmentation may impair the effectiveness of the whole, unless there is appropriate collaboration."

http://www.veryard.com/so/2006/04/loose-coupling.htm

I like Ron Ten-Hove's perspect on SOA; it really shouldn't be this hard. There are still too many moving parts, too much exposed complexity and thus too many places for mistakes.

The Developer's View of SOA: Just adding complexity?


"Developers don't need to think like architects. They need to concentrate on smaller problems. Composition of what developers create into larger systems is a separate task."

"What SOA should be about is what I like to call invisible plumbing..."

The 13 commandments of IT development:

IT Commandment: Thou shalt loosely couple by ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- Hard wiring processes should be a sin.

Interesting papers on Ruby and the enterprise. There are interesting comparisons between Java and RoR. Basically it points out that RoR really isn't ready to support service development, but shows its strengths for the front-end.

Nice library for doing "pop-ups" in the current browser window, over the current content.

DOMInclude

Interesting blog about RoR:

Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream

Good example of using FreeMarker to templatize emails:
Use freemarker to templatize emails

With FreeMarker's relatively light footprint and support already built into spring, how can you go wrong?

Interesting article on 12 best practices for Spring XML Configurations; this has been out for a while, but still good information.

Spring-xml-configuration-best-practices.html

Looks like W3C has standardized the XMLHttpRequest object:

http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/

Ajaxian has more info here:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/xmlhttprequest-w3c-working-draft