Community Tools
Applications
Convection - Secure File Exchange in Rails
An OSS file exchange platform for in Rails for those who prefer or need the security of a self-hosted tool.
Convection has group-based permissions and SSL support, and an easy interface that allows your clients to see all files available to them immediately upon login.
Insoshi - Open Source Social Networking
Insoshi allows you to set up and host your own social networking platform, and is an excellent starting point for Rails applications with social networking features.
Originally developed by Insoshi Inc., (Michael Hartl and Long Nguyen), Insoshi is now an open-source tool maintained by Logical Reality.
HOWTO Guides
Setting up CruiseControl.rb on Slicehost
Continuous Integration is a critical tool for development teams, and CruiseControl.rb is many Ruby developers' integration platform of choice.
Setting it up for a team can be frustrating, particularly since it's designed to run in a single user's home directory. Our guide will walk you through configuring it on a Slicehost server from start to finish.
Plugins and Gems
NinjaScript
NinjaScript: Javascript so unobtrusive, you'll never see it coming. NinjaScript, which runs on top of jQuery, provides extremely easy-to-use UJS tools including instant conversion of regular forms and links into AJAX equivalents. NS provides for reusable behaviors and automatic rebinding of events in a way that is more flexible than event-delegation methods like jQuery live().
Mizugumo
Mizugumo is a gem for Ruby on Rails 3 that provides easy, fully-degrading JavaScript behavior to your rails apps. Links with non-GET methods output forms instead for non JS users, and are converted by NinjaScript back into links. A provided scaffold generator makes a scaffold that works as fully AJAX when JS is enabled but degrades to page-reload behavior for non-JS users.
rspec-steps
Rspec-steps adds stepwise spec capability to rspec. With it, you can write integration or controller tests that run tests in sequence, preserving state between steps. If one step fails, the remaining ones in the sequence are marked pending.
We use it with capybara, selenium-webdriver, and database-cleaner to build full-stack integration/acceptance tests that run in-browser, test the javascript as well as the Rails code, run at the same time as all our other specs, and are written fully in rspec syntax (no vegetables necessary!). This means only one syntax for our team to know and maintain (rspec) for all our tests, and our whole test suite can run at once.
Logical Tabs
Logical Tabs is a set of rails helpers, javascript tools, and CSS files for generating a tabbed panel interface in a Rails application. It has three main advantages over the tab interface in jQuery UI: (1) nice Rails view helpers to format all the HTML for you, (2) Javascript files provided for both jQuery and Prototype, (3) the JS remembers your tab selection from page to page, so your last-selected tab is still selected when you return to a page later.