Welcome to the fourth edition of This Week in Rails, a weekly (and occasionally fortnightly) report with highlights from the Rails community.

David broke the news of the availability of confirmed and scheduled talks at RailsConf Europe which will be taking place this coming September. As you can see there will be a lot of exciting material this year, too.

The e-book Ruby on Rails 2.1 – What’s New is now available in 7 languages: English, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Italian and Korean. A Spanish version is coming as well. Olé!

A couple of weeks ago I took a close look at three Rails 2.1 database related bugs. On the same day, Phusion Passenger 2.0.2 was released. This edition backports a few bug fixes, including one for a small memory leak, and as such it’s highly recommended for anyone using Passenger 2 (aka mod_rails).

Kawaii is a web-based utility like script/console. The output of the inserted expression is visually appealing when compared to the one we’re used to in the shell. Speaking of shiny things, version 2 of the Open Flash Chart plugin was released. This page shows a few wicked cool, professional looking charts (and their code) that can be generated with it.

The article Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options discusses a few possible options for performing full text searches in Rails applications. When it comes to Sphinx, there are then two prominent plugins: UltraSphinx and ThinkingSphinx. Rein Henrichs from Hashrocket, compares the two approaches in his post titled A Thinking Man’s Sphinx.

The team behind Rails-Doc.org added a few more functionalities, including the ability to document the API for multiple versions of Rails.

Other noteworthy articles were the following:

• Mobilize Your Rails Application with Mobile Fu.
• The complete guide to setting up Starling, which includes installing and configuring workers, and how to monitor the services through god.
• Rockstar Memcaching, which is a presentation from the recent RubyFringe conference in Toronto.
• Using Emacs for Rails development – The perfect setup.
• Making SWFUpload and Rails work together.

Ryan Bates was interviewed by FiveRuns and his insightful answers are reported in Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Ryan Bates. He also published a couple of new railscasts on Liquid safe templates and on Session Based Models.

Rails Envy podcast number 39 was published this week. Check out also their hilarious video about Outdated HTML. And if you haven’t done so already, don’t miss the funniest voicemail and remix the Rails community has heard to date: We ain’t got no RSpec.

If you’d like to read more updates from the Ruby side of things, please head over to This Week in Ruby.