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What’s Hot on Github – September 2008

By Zach Inglis / September 10, 2008

GitHub LogoWhat'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.

Comments

  1. Yossef says:

    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.

  2. Zack Murphy says:

    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?

  3. srb says:

    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?

  4. José Valim says:

    view_specify is really handy!

    And two suggestions for the next post:

    http://github.com/drnic/rails-footnotes/
    http://github.com/josevalim/localized_templates/

    =)

  5. rick says:

    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.

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