I'm a few steps beyond "clueless newby" in creating an RoR
application, one of whose presentations is a Yahoo! map showing the
locations in the DB with all the nifty AJAXy stuff.

Before reinventing the wheel, are there worked examples, advice for
the lovelorn, etc. on how to:
* create a RoR find for the points that might be in view on a current map
* AJAXy ways to grab these as the user pans, zooms etc. the map, e.g.
don't do the find until things stop moving

If I can get this stuff even barely ticking over, I'll share the
results (like the whole app).

HANDY HINT: I *love* Aptana (http://www.aptana.org) as a multi-lingual
IDE for building RoR apps, RadRails plugs in seamlessly, and you have
the templates etc for CSS, HTML & JavaScript. There is a magic way to
load up API docs for onthefly prompts, but I haven't spent much time
playing with it. Aptana is an Eclipse-based thingy, so is available on
all the popular platforms.

jay