What’s Hot on Github – September 2008
What's Hot on Github is a monthly post highlighting new and/or interesting projects within the Ruby community that are hosted on Github. Github has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post.
This month's picks:
- Dust - Tool for finding unused or useless code
- can_search - Chain named scopes in a search query
- One inch punch - Time tracking with bash
- Cardjour - Share your vCard over bonjour
- view_specify - Auto-generate RSpec view specs by interrogating your existing views
- Spree - An open-source e-commerce application
- randexp - Generate random data from a Regular Expression
- active_shipping - Shipping extensions for active_merchant
- Webby - A lightweight and flexible website management system
- Shinmun - A small and beautiful blogging engine
Full disclosure: I (Zach) work with the guys who wrote view_specify and we've worked with the people responsible for active_shipping and one_inch_punch.
Have any projects to add or want to recommend a project for next month's post? Please leave a comment.
September 10, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Full disclosure: I (the author of one_inch_punch) was (probably) told in advance that it would appear on this list, but then I forgot.
This was a nice surprise.
September 10, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Thanks for this, a lot of these look really interesting.
I recently found can_search myself and it didn't seem that useful. It just introduced what ActiveRecord already has, but in a different way. ActiveRecord lets you search with ranges by default, that functionality is already built in:
User.find(:all, :conditions => {:id => (1..10)})
You can do that with dates or any range. And chaining scopes is the whole purpose of scopes. If I'm going to write:
can_search do
scoped_by :forums
end
Why not just write this myself?
named_scope :forums, lambda { |f| {:conditions => {:forum_id => f}} }
Just seems kind of pointless. It doesn't seem like it helps me do anything. Maybe I am missing something?
September 10, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Great column idea. Any chance you could give this a category of its own so I can easily see all the what's hot on githubs at once?
September 10, 2008 at 8:59 pm
view_specify is really handy!
And two suggestions for the next post:
http://github.com/drnic/rails-footnotes/
http://github.com/josevalim/localized_templates/
=)
September 12, 2008 at 12:06 am
Zack: If you look at the actual scopes, they're actually a bit more complex, accepting single models, arrays of models (or ids), or nil objects.
Still, it's not the most useful plugin. I mainly like it for the cool date ranges. There's another similar approach called scope_builder that you might like.