Alfa Jango Blog Engineering, Software, and Entrepreneurship

I was just thinking about how often I come across cool projects and libraries people are developing for Ruby. We all know you can create cool web applications Ruby on Rails, but what about all of the other cool things you can do with Ruby. So, I decided to put together a short list with summaries to help me remember why these projects are in my bookmarks. In no particular order:

Nanoc

Nanoc’s website describes it as “a tool that runs on your local computer and ‘compiles’ documents written in HTML, Markdown, Textile, Haml, etc. into a static web site, ready for uploading to any web server.” Basically, it takes your dynamic Ruby code and turns it into static HTML which you can then upload to your server, meaning you don’t necessarily need Ruby installed on your server. Of course, this depends on what your site actually needs to do. But I could see this as a perfect fit for a Blog, for which you write posts on your local machine and deploy. Of course you’d need to implement comments with a third-party javascript widget like Disqus, but that’s just one example.

Mongoid

Mongoid is a Ruby ODM framework for mapping your Ruby application to use MongoDB for object storage. If you haven’t checked out MongoDB as an alternative to using MySQL for your storage needs, it’s worth a look. You may not even realize you have different needs until you discover there’s a database out there to fit those needs. For another cool Database-Ruby integration alternative, see Friendly, a gem that makes MySQL look like a document-store to your application.