RubyFlow The Ruby and Rails community linklog

Where have all the libraries gone?

Anyone else noticed how few new libraries seem to be coming out in Rubyland lately? I’ve been noticing it a lot through my work curating Ruby Weekly. It’s hard to find much to mention nowadays. I scanned through here too and every week there’s maybe one or two posts linking to new libraries. Have we reached “peak library”? :-) (By contrast, with JavaScript Weekly I’m totally inundated with new stuff..)

Comments

I think we’re stabilized as a community. Rails is over a decade old and most of the problems have been solved thanks to a great ecosystem.

Almost any problem I have can be solved by a gem that’s already out there (email, databases, machine learning, personal relationship problems, it doesn’t matter- someone has made a gem for it already and it’s on Github)

I recently discovered Volt and Opal and I’m starting to get that great feeling of community involvement and innovation. The future is bright and there are still a lot of challenges to undertake.

If anyone has not tried out Opal or Volt, I encourage you to do so. The community is taking Ruby to new places and it just well could be the Next Big Thing™ for the ecosystem.

I’m with Rick on this. About five years ago I used to do Perl and while CPAN was massive, there were not that many new libraries coming out that were worthy of much attention. About the only time that happened was when a new framework like Catalyst came out, in which case it was more that wheels had been reinvented to fit the new framework.

Ruby seems a lot like that now, we’ve very rapidly filled out the Gem space for most of the common problems and we’re into diminishing returns, new gems are more and more niche.

Opal and Volt are great, and it will be good to have a fresh alternative to Rails that isn’t just an architectural rearrangement.

There is still space for new gems Could be breaking down of a bug/huge gem, or fixing specific problem(s) with alternative methods

Peter, TBH I was surprised that RubyWeekly never featured Lotus. We hit HN homepage with the initial announcement, and ThoughtWorks Radar twice.

We’re a small team of independent devs that love Ruby and OSS. It would be helpful if RW would mention us. Thank you.

The project offers both full stack web applications and an umbrella of lightweight, standalone libraries for MVC layers + HTTP routing + helpers and helpers (soon). These gems are based on stable projects like Rack, Tilt and Sequel.

Source code is available at https://github.com/lotus

I just released a library for manipulating nested data structures. You can check it out here:

https://github.com/dgopstein/deep_enumerable/

+1 to Lotus! Most interesting Ruby web framework out there right now, IMO.

I too will +1 lotus. If you like ruby and web development, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Lotus is the new Merb. Lets hope it doesn’t get merged in to Rails ;)

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