I have seen many sites which provide the whole list of Rails plugins, Ruby libraries and Ruby gems, but we hardly use few of them and some may not suit our requirement and we spend a whole lot of time searching for useful Plugins which suits our requirement.
I have created this poll, people can post useful libraries, gems and plugins which they have come across. It would be great help for newbies like me and to the entire Ruby on Rails community.
Note: to keep this poll as useful as possible, please remember:
- Post only one library, gem, or plugin per answer
- Mention the name of the library, gem, or plugin which you find it useful.
- URL of the location of the resource
- We don't want duplicate answers, so before posting check if the library has been mentioned already.
Edit: Any new plugins/Gems for Rails 3 ?
Thanks!
Will Paginate - essential for pagination.
devise - a more comprehensive authentication gem
Authlogic - Easy Authentication
Rspec - for BDD.
Formtastic - Awsome form helpers.
It lets you do things like this:
<% semantic_form_for @user do |f| %>
<% f.inputs do %>
<%= f.input :email %>
<%= f.input :password %>
<%= f.input :password_confirmation %>
<% end %>
<% f.buttons do %>
<%= f.commit_button 'Sign Up' %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
and get decent, semantic HTML:
FactoryGirl : Fixture replacement for focused and readable tests.
Paperclip - Simple file uploads
Nokogiri - for all your XML and HTML parsing and searching needs.
Capistrano - for easy deployment.
Faker - for creating valid, fake data. Great for populating an empty dev DB / testing.
Annotate - simple gem which adds something like
#== Schema Information
#
#Table name: buttons
#id :integer(4) not null, primary key
#text :string(255)
#font_size :integer(4)
#user_id :integer(4)
#created_at :datetime
#updated_at :datetime
#button_stats :integer(4) default(0), not null
to your model definitions and fixtures
Thinking Sphinx - for integrating with Sphinx for dead-simple text-searching in your app.
Clearance for authentication.
Populator - for pushing data into the DB when populating it. Used in conjunction with Faker. More info here.
cancan - for roles, companion of authlogic
Capistrano-ext - allows you to setup separate deploy recipes for staging / production / whatever other environment you have
Seed-Fu - Easy database seeding gem. Please don't use migrations to seed your database! :)
prawn - PDF generation
Cucumber - BDD and testing
It lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid - all rolled into one format.
grosser-rpx_now - Interface into RPXNow.com, which provides an interface into OpenID, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and much more in terms of authentication. A great companion for Authlogic.
Mofo gem - A ruby microformat parser , Helps to import Profile data from networking sites which implements microformats using hResume,hCard . ex LinkedIn , Xing ,Twitter etc .
Very useful gem .
soap4r: A must have for making soap calls!
Contacts is a universal interface to grab contact list information from various providers including Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.
jRails is a drop-in jQuery replacement for the Rails Prototype/script.aculo.us helpers.
Delayed Job for background processing.
calendar_date_select - calendar pop-up
thin, a faster http server
Webrat - testing
is a Ruby integration test library. It has two main purposes:
- Implement a browser simulator to allow fast, reliable integration testing (sans JavaScript) without requiring Selenium or Watir and their associated issues.
- Define a ubiquitous DSL for describing interacting with a web application from the perspective of an end user.
simple_form - built on top of formtastic, and despite its name it's even better giving you better control (by being agnostic) over layout and everything is configurable. I'm surprised it wasn't listed already as it's very popular.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1141998/most-useful-rails-plugins-ruby-libraries-and-ruby-gems