It's a great plugin for classic page rendering, but what if you want to use it with AJAX, so it updates a document element (a floating window layer, for instance) with the results instead of reloading the page?

Well, inspired on Redline's blog post (which almost worked for the latest version of the will_paginate plugin), I have the solution.

Create a link renderer. I put in under lib/remote_link_renderer.rb so Rails always loads it on startup.

class RemoteLinkRenderer < WillPaginate::LinkRenderer

  def page_link_or_span(page, span_class = 'current', text = nil)
    text ||= page.to_s
    if page and page != current_page
      @template.link_to_remote(text, {:url => url_for(page), :method => :get}.merge(@remote))
    else
      @template.content_tag :span, text, :class => span_class
    end
  end
end

On the view, when you are rendering the pager, do it like this:

<%= will_paginate @collection, :renderer => 'RemoteLinkRenderer' , :remote => {:with => ’value’, :update => ‘some_div’} %>

That's it!

IDEs:

• Aptana Rad Rails - very good at Rails and Ruby. It's based on Eclipse - Java - so it tends to bloat
• gedit- Tiny footprint, simple. Great for web and PHP with the right plugins and conf tweaks

Ruby / Rails plugins:

• will_paginate - ActiveRecord pagination made easy
• fleximage - online image processing Rails plug-in based on rmagick. Very easy to manipulate
• hpricot gem - for parsing HTML and XML. Very resilient to formatting errors. Use it to parse XML feeds with wrong encoding and screen scraping.
• authlogic - for easy and extensible authentication. With care you can make it easily authenticate with anything.
• BlueCloth gem - for markdown markup
• eventmachine - scalable asynchronous Ruby servers made easy.
• styled_objects - simplify stylesheet development and maintenance. By yours truly.
• delayed_job - job queuing for Rails made easy.
• app_config gem - easy application configuration. Easily differentiate for each environment.
• acts_as_xapian - easy ruby and Rails bindings for Xapian - full text search engine. Xapian uses offline index update and does not use a daemon.
• lockdown -  authorization system for Rails
• acts_as_pingable - to expose you Rails stack to external pings. Use it for pingdom.com integration.
• resource_controller - simplifies code for resource controllers (almost no code at all for most cases !)
• aasm (acts as state machine) - easily turn your objects into state machines.

Testing

• cucumber - BDD at it's best
• mocha - intuitive mocking and stubbing
• rspec and rspec-rails - Rails testing
• factory_girl - Get rid of fixtures

Database

• MySQL - I love it, I hate it, I have to live with it...
• Tokyo Cabinet - fast single table database for key-value store (it already has multiple columns format) with a simple Ruby API. Useful for a lot of things. You can also use Tokyo Tyrant for service.

Deployment

• Capistrano - although there are some simpler alternatives around, I simply love Capistrano and use it for almost everything deployment-related.
• capistrano-ext - with multistaging deployment, among other goodies.