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What's in your toolbox?

July 18th, 2007


Tool box

A number of members of the Rails community have been known to show us their Gems on occasion.

So what's in your tool box?

Introducing Tool Parade

 
   sudo gem install ToolParade

On the command line run

 
   toolparade
and follow the instructions.

Ruby Gems and Rails Plugins on your system are automatically scanned and the result uploaded to Working With Rails for all to see

Great! you say. But why do this?

Benefits

  • Find out what other libraries members of the community use - get ideas for ones that you might want to install.

  • Gem builders / plugin authors - see how many developers use your gem and which version.

  • See a list of libraries with a bias on member authority - find out what the top developers are using

  • Allows the system to make intelligent recommendations of gems/plugins you may also be interested in. (future functionality)

Extra action marching band RailsConf 07

Flickr credit: http://flickr.com/photos/rorris/504842150/

Get browsing

Remember when you use Tool Parade you influence the above lists.

There is more

In addition to the new features discussed above there is also a new top level navigation bar which hopefully makes things easier while browsing the WWR site. Also take a look at the groups section as it's now possible to see the top list of Groups based on member authority.

Feedback

Like the features? Or have a suggestion or comment? Drop a line this way

UPDATE

We are now on version 0.0.2 of the Gem which adds support for plugin descriptions via scanning the Readme.

Download it from the above link.

Now available on RubyForge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/toolparade/

OR

sudo gem install ToolParade

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11 Responses to “What's in your toolbox?”

  1. Ben Reubenstein Says:

    $ sudo gem install ToolParade-0.0.1.gem Password: Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException) Could not find ToolParade-0.0.1.gem (> 0) in any repository

  2. Martin Sadler Says:

    Hi Ben,

    It's not on RubyForge yet - I'm waiting for the project to get approval. In the mean time you can download it from:

    http://workingwithrails.com/ToolParade-0.0.1.gem

    Hope that helps, Martin.

  3. Martin Sadler Says:

    UPDATE: It's on RubyForge now so the standard: sudo gem install ToolParade

    will work

  4. Eric Says:

    There appears to be a bug in the code. In toolparade you have require_gem 'ToolParade', version. That's deprecated (and doesn't work on my setup) and should say gem 'ToolParade', version.

    Then the world gets better.

  5. Martin Sadler Says:

    Hi Eric, I have dropped you a mail.

  6. Daniel Haran Says:

    This is a fantastic idea. I have a lot of plugins in /vendor/plugins that don't seem to get picked up. Do they have to be gems?

  7. Martin Sadler Says:

    In regards to the require_gem issue we think it's down to not having the latest version of RubyGems. In order to get round this make sure you are up to date by doing: gem update --system

    See http://rubygems.org/read/chapter/3 for more

    Daniel, just dropped you a mail

  8. Chad Mais Says:

    After updating RubyGems the error changes to:

    Warning: require_gem is obsolete. Use gem instead.

  9. Martin Sadler Says:

    Hi Chad,

    You should be able to remedy this by uninstalling the ToolParade gem and then installing it again.

    I believe it's the same issue many people had when updating Gems for Rails a while back. See:

    http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/2007/2/6/in-case-you-re-having-trouble-installing-gems

    (some helpful info there).

  10. Eric Says:

    Sorry I didn't respond earlier, but Martin is right - the bug I reported above is remedied by updating rubygems.

    I now get the warning on all my gems....GAHHHH! That's not ToolParade's fault of course.

  11. Tim Harper Says:

    This looks fantastic!

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