In part I I wrote about the hows and whys of gathering gem/plugin usage data based on Rails Rumble submitted user information, and in this part I would like to present my findings. So without further ado, here we go:
Prototype/jQuery
I already covered this in part I, but for completeness’ sake, here is the chart again:
It seems that jQuery is (not so) slowly replacing Prototype as the javascript framework of Rails – which is still better (from the Prototype POV) than with Merb, where jQuery is the default framework (oh yeah, I know, Merb is everything-agnostic etc. etc. but I think vast majority of merbists are using Datamapper, jQuery etc. (?)).
Skeleton Applications
Well… this chart is rather dull:
One in every three teams used a skeleton application (which in this context can be replaced with ‘Bort’).
The sovereignity of Bort is a bit surprising given that it’s not the only player in the field by far – there are definitely others, like ThoughtBot’s suspenders, Blank by James Golick, starter-app by Pat Maddox, appstarter by Lattice Purple just to name a few.
I am not sure about the others, but the absence of suspenders from the chart has more to do with the fact that it was not yet publicly released before Rails Rumble – I am basing this claim on the fact that a lot of people used the gems/plugins which, combined together, are basically suspenders.
However, this doesn’t alter the fact that Bort is immensely popular – great stuff, Jim.
Testing Frameworks
I think there are (at least) 2 things to note here:
- Testing in Ruby/Rails is not considered optional even facing a very tight deadline. Even if we assume that the 49% didn’t test at all (which surely doesn’t sound too realistic – they probably just went with Test::Unit), more than half of the teams did!
- Though testing tools are a much debated topic nowadays, and the winner is not clear (yet) – I would guess, based on the above results there is roughly an 1:1:1 ration between Test::Unit, rspec and shoulda *currently* – there are definitely interesting alternatives to Test::Unit.
Mocking
Not much to add here – though the above chart says nothing about how much people are using e.g. Mocha with rSpec (vs. using the rSpec built-in mocking tools), one thing is clear – as a stand-alone mocking framework, Mocha reigns supreme.
Exception Notification
Another point for ThoughtBot (not the last one in this list) – Hoptoad has no disadvantage compared to the more traditional Exception Notifier (if we don’t count getting an API-key, which takes about a minute) – on the upside, you get a beautiful and user friendly web GUI.
Full-text Search
I found the above chart interesting for two reasons:
- I thought that Ferret and/or acts_as_solr are still somewhat popular – it turns out they are not
- I also thought Thinking Sphinx is the de-facto fulltext search plugin, and didn’t know about Xapian – well, I learned something new again.
Uploading
ThoughtBot did it again – Paperclip is already more popular than the old-school attachment-fu. I am always a bit cautious when someone challenges the status quo (like Nokogiri vs.
Hpricot, Authlogic vs. Restful Authentication, attachment-fu vs. Paperclip etc.) but it seems Paperclip is ripe to take over. You can find some interesting tutorials here and here.
User Authentication
Another dull graph for you:
I am wondering how homogenous this chart would be if Authlogic would have appeared earlier – it seems like a strong challenger (already watched by around 260 people on github) and I am sure it will take a nice slice of the pie in the future.
What’s more interesting is the openID support: more than one third of the apps offered openID authentication, and quite a few of them *solely* openID.
Misc
- factory_girl was used to replace traditional fixtures in every 6th of the apps!
- HAML/SASS is quite popular – used in about 20% of the applications
- Hpricot was the only HTML/XML parser used (in 7 apps alltogerher)
What I am happy about the most is that there is still a lot of innovation going on in the Rails world – as you can see, newer and newer plugins/gems are appearing and in some (in fact, a lot of) cases are dethroning their good ol’ competitors. There is a lot of competition going on in almost every major area of Rails web development, and this is always a good thing.
Very interesting; thanks for doing this. Now I don’t have to 🙂
A note: Team Giraffesoft did use Blank, though we may have been the only ones. Whenever we have time, we will be adding features to it from the rails rumble.
@Daniel: oops, somehow I didn’t notice it (indeed, you stated ‘Initial application forked from Blank’) – but statistically it doesn’t change the picture too much :-). It’s still like 32:1 in favor of Bort or something like that.
In the future it would be great if the Rails Rumble organizers would agree on a common format to make the generation of the above charts possible/easier – e.g. a checklist (‘skeleton app: ‘, ‘JS framework: ‘ + output of gem list + ls RAILS_ROOT/vendor/plugins or something.
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Hi,
Thanks for the great article. Very insightful. I personally know of 3-4 teams that uses suspenders. You can tell a suspenders app because it will have a doc/READMEFORTEMPLATE file.
Our team used suspenders for our skeleton application and clearance for user authentication. Between those two tools, we had a working, authenticating app 15 minutes after the competition started.
@Chad, @Dan: Sorry, I used the user supplied data to collect the tools (and obviously didn’t have a clue about the doc/READMEFORTEMPLATE file), so the results represent only what I was able to reconstruct from that…
Love the graphical break down. Great post Peter, thanks.
How about the html template? haml vs erb?
@Richy:
The final bulleted list says: “HAML/SASS is quite popular – used in about 20% of the applications”
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Excellent idea and data! and nice graphs… what did you build them with?
— nachokb
@nachokb: Thanks! Graphs… Microsoft PowerPoint on OS X.
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not bad
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You you should edit the blog title Ruby, Rails, Web2.0 » Blog Archive » Rails Rumble Observations, part II – trends in gem/plugin usage to something more specific for your content you make. I liked the post nevertheless.