Rally Software Development will announce on Monday an upgrade to its hosted service for agile software development projects featuring a toolkit accommodating Ruby programming as well as better integration with third-party developer products.

Improvements are part of the 2007.2 release of the Rally platform, which is being unveiled at the SD West 2007 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

The Ruby REST (Representation State Transfer) toolkit uses REST Web services to store Ruby applications within the Rally SaaS platform. "You can use whatever Ruby IDE you'd like to use," said Ryan Martens, Rally founder and CTO. 

Integration capabilities in the new release include a new Web services API, connectors and export capabilities. With these improvements, users can coordinate a software development process using agile methods and integrate with existing role-based software development tools. Users can use the API to link to repositories and IDEs as well as CRM applications and other enterprise systems.

Integrations can occur between Rally and application lifecycle management products like BMC Remedy and Bugzilla, for example.

Also with the 2007.2 release, users of Rally Agile Product Manager can publish a release to Rally with a single click and view real-time development and release status.

An MPX (Microsoft Project exchange) file export capability in the upgrade enables integration with enterprise portfolio management systems based on Microsoft Project. 

To promote the health of software releases, an "information radiators" capability provides real-time reports, views, and trending for defects, Rally said.