I’m always impressed by the continuous flow of innovation from the Rails community. Below are just a few of the highlights from the past month. These stories all came from the Ruby5 Podcast, which covers all the news from the Ruby and Rails community twice weekly.

Authentication

The talented Brazilian guys over at Plataformatec released the Devise gem this week, which is a new authentication option for your Rails app. Devise is a Rails Engine which sits on top of Warden, a Rack authentication framework. This makes Devise a little more flexible then other Rails authentication libraries, and is definitely worth a look.

However if your application needs something much more simple, maybe check out Terry Heath’s OpenID Rails Engine. It should take you about 10 minutes to have an authentication system up and running, and you won’t have to worry about storing your users’ passwords.

Helpful Libraries

Thanks to Twitter’s new Streaming API we no longer have to poll every 5 seconds to discover new tweets. To start using it today check out the TweetStream Gem by