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Ruby on Rails and Open Source Rails Applications

October 8th, 2010

While I'm absolutely enamored with Ruby these days, I have to admit that it took me awhile to open up to it. Why? Because I'm usually skeptical of hype, and there have been an abundance of Ruby on Rails hype.

I'm still a little skeptical Rails! Consequently, I have embraced Sinatra - and I'm glad I did, because in my humble opinion, it rocks! From a practical perspective, Sinatra does not have the same reach as Rails, i.e. - droves of people have heard of Rails, and that can be an important factor.

My experience with Rails is this: I've created a few test applications with Rails and support a production Rails application for one of my clients. That said, I need to brush up on my Rails.

What should I do? I'll look to the open source world for some open source Rails examples! Here are a few I've been familiar with for awhile:

  • Radiant: A CMS
  • Redmine: An Issue Tracker
  • Gitorious: A Web Interface for Git Repositories
  • Ovirt: A virtual machine manager
  • Mailr: A web interface

These should help me learn and embrace Ruby on Rails! Still - I'll personally favor the mojo I have going on with Sinatra, jQuery, and XSL.

Radiant

Radiant is Rails-esque, meaning you can generate a new site skeleton, much like Rails can generate an app skeleton.

Radiant also has cool extensions like:

  • Electrostatic - render pages to static files
  • super_export - import/export of database to and from YAML files (would be nice to have JSON as well)

Redmine

This has a truly sweet interface, and is compatible with multiple version control repositories. I'm assuming its also compatible with the databases that Rails is generally compatible with: MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, etc.

Gitorious

Sorry, I'm a GitHub guy. I've tinkered around with Gitorious and was impressed, but felt it had some user interface issues.

Ovirt

Haven't used it yet, but its a virtual machine management interface.

Mailr

Looks cool, but why does it not support SQLite?? RoundCube does.

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