A route to serve static assets (like .jpgs, etc?)

I think the simplest way solve this problem is just using image_path helper method, which provide you the path for the image you want to display in the view. For example, if you want to refer a logo.png under the /assets/images/logo.png, you can just use image_path('logo.png').

If you put the "images" directory into the "public" folder of the Rails app (for example: /public/images/) then you shouldn't have any problems with MIME types unless your web server is configured wrongly.

According to your examples, you want the images dir in the root of the app. I don't think there is a way though Rails to make those images visible, but if you really wanted to you could use mod_rewrite to make it work. Once again, it would be up to the web server to make sure the images had the correct MIME type.

Things that are served out of the public directory will not go through Rails - they'll just be handled by your server (probably apache). The only reason why you would need to serve images through the rails system is if you wanted some kind of control on who could access them. Just put everything else in public and access ala: siteurl.whatever/images/*.jpg

I typically use nginx as a frontend and Apache/Passenger as a backend. Ngingx proxies all Rails requests to Apache but handles all static content itself. Check out the examples on the English nginx wiki. Here is a small excerpt for nginx config:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.domain.com;
    location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|bmp|js)$ {
        root   /path/to/static/assets/dir;
    }
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:81;
    }
}

So have apache listen on port 81 to handle Rails requests proxied by nginx and let nginx deliver static content. Not only is nginx supposedly faster than Apache at delivering static content, but this also offloads your Rails application for every image, stylesheet, javascript or whatever other static content.