

Ask HN: what are you favorite/absolutely must have/niche Ruby gems? - dzlobin

Hey guys,
me and my co-founder are starting development on our startup, and since it's overwhelmingly ruby, we'd love to hear about any interesting gems we should be using. So shoot!<p>Thanks!
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hitonagashi
Really, it all depends on what you are doing :).

For example, Geokit rocks if you need to do, or add any geoencoding stuff.

If you can get past the hell on earth that is installing ImageMagick, then
RMagick is amazing for image processing and handling.

If you need to write HTML, Haml/Sass is your new best friend, if you need to
parse it, Nokigiri or Hpricot both rock.

If you need to track states in your objects, statemachine or eventmachine is
pretty useful, and +1 to the commenter who pointed out ThinkingSphinx, that's
blazingly fast for full text indexes.

The daemons gem is really useful if you want to daemonize a process, and
create quick scripts to start background applications.

workling/starling are really good for background work as well, as is
delayed_job.

It also depends on what ruby version you are using. I'd recommend 1.9, as
we've managed to get patches for pretty much everything we run, or hacked the
gems themselves to work, and it _is_ faster than 1.8.6. That said, you do
still run into problems.

There's loads more. There's more testing frameworks and unit test things than
you can shake a stick at.

As I said it all depends what you are using, and what you are using it for.

Hope my ramble was informative! :-)

~~~
dzlobin
It certaintly was! Thanks a lot!

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jlangenauer
If you're using Rails: \- searchlogic: incredibly easy searching of
ActiveRecord models. I've cut out huge amounts of code by using this gem. \-
factory_girl: get rid of those awful fixtures!

Also, even though it's not a gem, JRuby is an awesome platform - I actually
prefer it to MRI after using it. It's incredibly stable, fast, and bugs are
fixed damn quick. I reported a bug in JRuby-OpenSSL yesterday at about 9am,
and there was a fix done by 1pm. Very impressive.

~~~
dzlobin
We're actually not going to go the rails route; but I'll check those out on my
own, thanks!

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gtani
full text indexing: thinking sphinx, sunspot,

need to look at: acts_as_xapian

used in past: acts_as_ferret, acts_as_solr

