Question

I’ve been building Rails Application Prototypes and Loving it. I’m aware that there are many pre-build libraries to utilize in projects.

While, I’m not a fan of using plugins for managing login and user authentication, which is core part of the app, aside from that what other chores can be dealt with plugins/gems, like pagination etc.

What do you use in your day to day rails development.

Answer 1

There are times when using freely available plugins/gems (libraries) may not be suitable but since it is quite trivial to review the code of these, in the long run you will find that many of these gems can be quite handy. A lot of these are also actively kept up to date by the community and this is also an important point as Rails in particular has been evolving at a fairly rapid pace.

For example, Devise has been around for quite sometime and if you look at the amount of support this tends to translate into a commensurate number of blog articles and how-to’s on the web; even here on SO Devise in particular gets many questions. It also has many modules that you can incorporate within your app, or just disable if you do not require their functionality.

Rather than going into the benefits of plugins, I suggest you visit http://rubygems.org/ as it let’s you go through the various gems based on their particular functionality.

Personally, I use Devise as well as authentication from scratch, Omniauth, Kaminari (pagination), CanCan for ACL and quite a bit more. This is the Gemfile from one of my recent apps and it should give you a decent idea of what I use.

Being familiar with popular gems is quite handy as it means rather than having to ‘re-invent the wheel’, when it simply comes to getting the job done… you do have options – especially when it’s not the sole purpose of your app. Certainly though, if you’re up to creating custom plugins or decide to pull out reusable code into plugins, do share them with the community.

Hope this helps!