Today Ninh Bui and Hongli Lai from Phusion visited the Fingertips office to introduce us to their Passenger Apache module for Rails. We’re very impressed with their work; installation and deployment is fast and easy and everything just works out of the box.

These guys did a really important job by completely removing the deployment hassle that has always been associated with Rails. They’ve made Rails deployment boring.

We’ll be testing Passenger on a server that’s running 15 small to medium Rails apps. You can expect an in-depth article about our experiences when Passenger will be released ‘any day now, honestly’.

If you’re interested in using Passenger in a bigger environment (for example, if you’re a shared hosting provider who wants to offer Rails support), you should get in touch with these guys to talk about the professional services they provide. Not only because they’re smart, but also because they’re a lot of fun to chat with. We really enjoyed their company.

This is from a nice new app we’ve been working on for the last month or so. Any idea what it is and who we’re building this for?

Update: First right answer gets two great books. Can’t tell you what they are about without giving away the answer, I’m afraid…