What Rails Plugins Are Good, Stable and *Really* Enhance Your Code

What rails plugins are good, stable and *really* enhance your code?

You can use bort as reference

Plugins Installed

Bort comes with a few commonly used
plugins installed and already setup.

RESTful Authentication

RESTful Authentication is already
setup. The routes are setup, along
with the mailers and observers.
Forgotten password comes setup, so you
don’t have to mess around setting it
up with every project.

The AASM plugin comes pre-installed.
RESTful Authentication is also setup
to use user activation.

User Roles

Bort now comes with Role Requirement
by Tim Harper. A default admin role is
predefined along with a default admin
user. See the migrations for the admin
login details.

Open ID Authentication

Bort, as of 0.3, has Open ID
integrated with RESTful
Authentication. Rejoice!

Will Paginate

We use will_paginate in pretty much
every project we use, so Bort comes
with it pre-installed.

Rspec & Rspec-rails

You should be testing your code, so
Bort comes with Rspec and Rspec-rails
already installed so you’re ready to
roll.

Exception Notifier

You don’t want your applications to
crash and burn so Exception Notifier
is already installed to let you know
when everything goes to shit.

Asset Packager

Packages up your css/javascript so
you’re not sending 143 files down to
the user at the same time. Reduces
load times and saves you bandwidth.

p/s: agree with @eric, specifics

Your favorite lesser-known Rails gems/plugins

I just started using App_Version. It's nice to be able to put the version of the app that your running on the bottom of your page (Like the "svn revision" number on the bottom right-hand corner of this page).

Rails authorization plugins

I ended up using declarative_authorization. Now it seems that auth_logic is where the community is headed.

declarative_auth would have been really simple if it wasn't for our apps multi-tennant db
model. I had to modify the source a bit to make it all work, but it wasn't too tough to do, and
I was pretty green when I started this project.

It seems like you really can't go wrong with any of the solutions. cancan seemed cool too
but it would have needed more mods for what I was doing so I decided against it.

Its written by Ryan Bates though which is cool. Love rails casts! :)

I know this post is old but I figured I'll update any because you never know.

Are there any Rails Plugins that use JS to poll the server for completion of a background process?

I ended up using a PeriodicalUpdater plugin for jQuery. Here's the link:

http://www.360innovate.co.uk/blog/2009/03/periodicalupdater-for-jquery/

Are there any good googlemaps plugins for rails?

I've always just used GeoKit for all things GoogleMaps... it's a little old, but all the source code for "Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails" is available at http://googlemapsbook.com/source/. It should walk you through pretty well on how to write the code for the front end. Advanced Rails Recipes also has some great code recipes on building geocoded points into GoogleMaps.

What Ruby IDE do you prefer?

Have you tried Aptana? It's based on Eclipse and they have a sweet Rails plugin.

Rails Search Plugins & Solutions

Sphinx is very good. Check out this excellent Railscast on the Thinking Sphinx plugin.

How should I upgrade a Rails app to use the latest version of Rails

I went through this a few months back, did a lot of research and put together a rake task (based on someone else's script plus additional resources) that might help you in flagging things to change in your code. This was for upgrading to Rails 2.2 so it doesn't take into account Rails 2.3 changes:

http://gist.github.com/99535

Oh, be sure to check that the plugins and gems you use are Rails 2.x compatible and use the latest versions.

And I definitely agree with upgrading directly to Rails 2.3 in one go. And don't keep putting it off; the longer you go without upgrading, the more difficult it will be as more will have changed. And it's harder to maintaing Rails 1.x code as there are less resources that support it.

Learning Ruby on Rails

I've been moving from C# in my professional career to looking at Ruby and RoR in my personal life, and I've found linux to be slightly more appealing personally for development. Particularly now that I've started using git, the implementation is cleaner on linux.

Currently I'm dual booting and getting closer to running Ubuntu full time. I'm using gedit with various plugins for the development environment. And as of late 2010, I'm making the push to use Vim for development, even over Textmate on OS X.

A large amount of the Rails developers are using (gasp) Macs, which has actually got me thinking in that direction.

Although I haven't tried it, Ruby in Steel gives you a Ruby IDE inside the Visual Studio world, and IronRuby is the .NET flavor of Ruby, if you're interested.

As far as books are concerned, the Programming Ruby (also known as the Pickaxe) book from the Pragmatic Programmers is the de-facto for learning Ruby. I bit the bullet and purchased that book and Agile Web Development with Rails; both books have been excellent.

Peepcode screencasts and PDF books have also been great for getting started; at $9 per screencast it's hard to go wrong. I actually bought a 5-pack.

Also check out the following:

• Official Rails Guides
• Railscasts
• railsapi.com or Ruby on Rails - APIdock
• The Ruby Show
• Rails for Zombies
• Softies on Rails - Ruby on Rails for .NET Developers
• Rails Podcast
• Rails Best Practices

I've burned through the backlog of Rails and Rails Envy podcasts in the past month and they have provided wonderful insight into lots of topics, even regarding software development in general.

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