Every 6 months or so I do a head’s down exploration of new gems out there in the Ruby world. The speed of progress int he open source world amazes me. For those that are interested, here are some of my recent findings:
- authlogic: an excellent authentication framework for Ruby and Rails. It’s quickly replacing restful_authentication as the standard.
- settingslogic: a small app config gem similar to app_config.
- trollop: a great command line parser for ruby apps. Beats the tar out of optparse.
- factory_girl: a solid replacement for fixtures
- sinatra: a lightweight HTTP server. Very nice.
- logging: a replacements for the aging, outdated log4r project.



