In other news, most Rails apps are slow because the developers are ignorant of database basics. Not slamming the blog's author, but it is a good example of how easy it is to mess up a Rails application's performance by something simple like not creating indices in your database.
Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails. A List Apart on our favourite web development framework.
formtastic "is a Rails FormBuilder DSL (with some other goodies) to make it far easier to create beautiful, semantically rich, syntactically awesome, readily stylable and wonderfully accessible HTML forms in your Rails applications."
StripAttributes is one of the quietest, smallest, but at the same time most useful Rails plugin I've seen recently, letting you specify ActiveRecord model attributes that will automatically get stripped of their leading and trailing whitespace, which without this plugin you'd have to do manually.
Why I think Ruby on Rails is an ideal web development environment. Andy Jeffries, PHP developer, on Ruby on Rails. Includes a mention of the recently released Phusion Passenger that has been making waves, making the deployment of Rails applications a zero-configuration game.
Why mod_rails is great for light-duty Rails apps at Pervasive Code is an in-depth look at Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails' performance and memory footprint.
Seed Fu: Simple Seed Data for Rails. I was just looking for something like that today. With people moving away from fixtures for their automated tests and now this providing a better way to reset your application to an initial default state, are fixtures still needed at all?