I realized that it's been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately it seems like the amount of interesting stuff I have to write about is inversely proportional to the spare time I have available for writing... ;) Anyway, I figure I'll try to get back into the habit of publishing smaller posts, but hopefully more regularly. Let's see how it goes......

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Rails 2.1 natively supports incoming JSON requests. Unfortunately, it still struggles with JSON data containing non-ASCII characters. According to the JSON spec, JSON fully supports UTF-8 encoded text, so with a few exceptions it generally should not be necessary to escape non-ASCII characters with \u Unicode escape sequences. However, many JSON libraries appear to escape all non-ASCII text in this fashion....

I've been meaning to set up a network monitoring tool at work for a while. We have a couple of different applications using various technologies (currently mainly Ruby on Rails and PHP), running on various VPS servers....

According to this blog post and several mentions on Twitter, Phusion announced today's release of Passenger (aka mod\_rails) 2.0 at RailsConf. Apparently, Passenger 2.0 will be Rack compliant and thus support not only Rails, but any Rack compatible web framework, including Merb and Sinatra....

Earlier this week, we tried to figure out the cleanest and easiest way to get our Rails app to accept incoming JSON requests. Up until recently, developers were able to use various Rails plugins for this purpose, such as the json_request plugin....