20 Dec 2013

Discover gems with Ruby Toolbox

Building a toolbox of frequently-used gems is an important part of being an effective ruby developer. Being able to pull out the right gem for the task at hand saves hours of needless work.

But what do you do when you’re presented with a new problem or task that you’ve not dealt with before? How do you figure out if there’s already a gem that encapsulates the functionality you’re about to write?

There are thousands of gems out there (RubyGems.org reports 67,785 at the time of writing), so how do you pick the right one? How do you even find out what your options are?

Enter The Ruby Toolbox. RT is a fantastic site that groups gems by functionality and ranks them by popularity.

Let’s say I’m looking for a pagination gem. RT’s pagination category tells me that the main contenders are will_paginate and kaminari. Perfect! Now I can check each of them out and pick the one that I like better.

Next time you’re about to implement a feature in your latest project, make sure to check The Ruby Toolbox first. It makes gem discovery so much easier.

Thanks for reading! If you like my writing, you may be interested in my book: Healthy Webhook Consumption with Rails

David at 20:10