Meeting notes: June 2, 2010 -- useful gems and more

[Igal Koshevoy]

We had a good meeting at a room provided by the Open Source Bridge conference:

PRESENTATIONS

1. Brian Ford of Engine Yard talked about Rubinius, an open source
Ruby implementation written mostly in Ruby, that recently shipped
their 1.0 release: http://rubini.us/

2. Monty Williams of Gemstone talked about MagLev, a Ruby
implementation written on their Smalltalk VM, that they've been making
steady progress on: http://ruby.gemstone.com/

3. Igal Koshevoy talked about OpenConferenceWare, an open source Ruby
on Rails platform used by Open Source Bridge and other conferences for
collecting proposals and publishing sessions, schedules, speaker bios
and more: http://openconferenceware.org/

DISCUSSIONS

What gems do you tend to include into any new project? (This
discussion expanded into what tools and libraries you really like)
- RSpec, a behavior-driven development (BDD) testing framework --
http://rspec.info/
- factorygirl, a Rails testing library for building factories to
create model instances as an alternative to fixtures --
http://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl
- HTTParty, a client library for using RESTful XML and JSON web
services -- http://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty
- JSONLint, a website for validating and reformatting JSON -- -
http://www.jsonlint.com/
- acts_as_taggable_on, a Rails plugin that provides tagging features
for models -- http://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on
http://github.com/pboling/exception_notification
- Super Exception Notifier, a Rails plugin for sending emails if an
uncaught exception is raised --
http://github.com/pboling/exception_notification
- Hoptoad, a commercial service for Rails and other frameworks for
collecting exception notifications -- http://hoptoadapp.com/
- Exceptional, a commercial service for Rails for collecting exception
notifications -- http://www.getexceptional.com/
- mislav's will_paginate, a Rails plugin for paginating through arrays
of model instances in views -- http://github.com/mislav/will_paginate
- HAML, an alternative representation of HTML with plugins for Rails
and other frameworks -- http://haml-lang.com/
- SASS, an alternative representation of CSS with plugins for Rails
and other frameworks -- http://sass-lang.com/
- Compass, a CSS framework and utilities using SASS -- http://compass-style.org/
- awesome_print, a library for pretty printing data structures --
http://github.com/michaeldv/awesome_print
- hirb, a library for pretty printing table-like structures --
http://tagaholic.me/hirb/
- drx, a library for pretty printing data structures using graphics --
http://drx.rubyforge.org/
- Reid Beel's ~/.irbrc -- http://gist.github.com/421839
- cucumber, a behavior driven development (BDD) testing framework that
puts the specifications first -- http://cukes.info/
- webrat, a library that simulates a web browser for use in tests --
http://github.com/brynary/webrat
- mechanize, a library that simulates a web browser used for
automating interaction and scraping websites --
http://mechanize.rubyforge.org/mechanize/
- newrelic, a plugin for Rails and other frameworks that offers free
local performance profiling (how long did that action take and why?)
plus commercial service for collecting and analyzing this data plus
alerting you of performance problems -- http://github.com/newrelic/rpm
- Capistrano, a rake-like tool used mostly for deploying web
applications -- http://www.capify.org/index.php/Capistrano
- Capistrano Colors, a Capistrano extension that adds colors so you
can clearly see error messages when it's running --
http://github.com/stjernstrom/capistrano_colors
- capistrano-ext, a Capistrano extension that adds multiple stages
(e.g. production, staging, etc) --
http://www.capify.org/index.php/Deploying_to_Multiple_Stages
- capistrano fast remote cache, a Capistrano extension that provides
an faster remote cache deployment --
http://github.com/37signals/fast_remote_cache
- cap_gun, a Capistrano extension that sends emails when a deployment
is done -- http://github.com/relevance/cap_gun
- bundler, a library for declaring, installing and loading gem
dependencies -- http://github.com/carlhuda/bundler
- formtastic, a Rails plugin that makes it much easier to make forms
in views: http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic
- feedzirra, a library for fetching and parsing RSS and ATOM feeds --
http://github.com/pauldix/feedzirra
- geokit, a library and Rails plugin that provides geospatial features
like finding things by distance. However, because it doesn't use
database-level geospatial features, it's very easy to install and use,
but is slower and less exact than solutions that do --
http://geokit.rubyforge.org/
- georuby, a library for using the fast and accurate geospatial
features of PostgreSQL (PostGIS) and MySQL (Spatial Extensions) --
http://georuby.rubyforge.org/
- ym4r (yellow maps for rails), a Rails plugin for using georuby --
http://ym4r.rubyforge.org/ &&
http://ym4r.rubyforge.org/ym4r_mapstraction-doc/
- nokogiri, a library for fast HTML and XML parsing -- http://nokogiri.org/
- ocra (one-click Ruby application build), a tool for creating Windows
.exe files from Ruby source code: http://ocra.rubyforge.org/
- railroad, a tool for creating class diagrams: http://railroad.rubyforge.org/
- ghost, a tool for creating, listing and modifying hostnames --
http://github.com/bjeanes/ghost
- devise, a Rails plugin for authentication that's very easy to start
with -- http://github.com/plataformatec/devise
- authlogic, a Rails plugin for authentication that's more extensive
-- phttp://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic
- inherited_resources, a Rails plugin that can dramatically simplify
what your controllers do by providing sensible default behaviors and
easy overrides -- http://github.com/josevalim/inherited_resources
- Libraries and plugins for representing tree-like structures:
- http://github.com/stefankroes/ancestry
- http://github.com/chris/better_nested_set
- http://github.com/collectiveidea/awesome_nested_set
- http://github.com/datamapper/dm-more/tree/master/dm-is-tree/

-igal

[Ed Phillips]

Thank you for this extensive summary listing. Excellent work. Very
much appreciated.

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[Xavier (DBIYF)]

On 17/06/10 4:22 AM, Igal Koshevoy wrote:
> - factorygirl, a Rails testing library for building factories to
> create model instances as an alternative to fixtures --
> http://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl

Just wanted to throw Machinist in here, all the Australian guys use it
in preference to factory_girl. Nicer syntax.
http://github.com/notahat/machinist

Cheers,
Xavier

--
@xshay
www.dbisyourfriend.com <- Rails DB training