A Site For Rails Plugin Comparisons?

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Permalink Reply by John on October 1, 2008 at 6:03pm

There's http://agilewebdevelopment.com/ but I assume you already know of this. It's the main site others reference for Rails plugins. It does include ratings and categorizations but not comparisons.

I think the comparison has value though when I did my research on search plugins (like sphinx, solr, etc), using google and pulling up a dozen pages was good enough for my needs (wound up using thinkingsphinx which I have been happy with).

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Permalink Reply by Kurt Sussman on October 2, 2008 at 6:14pm

I search on github.com, though it's not the end-all source of plugins. I usually find what I need or something close, and a near-miss usually gives me some keywords to narrow my google search.

Then I google the plugin name along with any competitors I know of, and look for the blogs and railsforum.com posts that have the depth I'm looking for.

And as John said, the http://agilewebdevelopment.com/ site has user ratings. I find them moderately useful. I make my choice by looking for more depth or just spending time playing with my top choices side by side. It's a big time sink, but I learn a lot.

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Permalink Reply by Laurence A. Lee on October 3, 2008 at 11:38am

Yeah, that's been the usual approach I've been taking to discover Plugins. It sure is a lot of work to explore Plugins. Or else you're buying all the various Recipe books that come out every 6 months or so.

It wouldn't be so bad if script/plugin had a "query" option, so if I did a script/plugin query "search", all the plugins tagged with "search" would come up. But that'd require some substantial changes to script/plugin, and a coordinated voluntary effort for all Plugin Authors to add a metadata file with related Tags.

My other gripe is that Rails moves up (and deprecates stuff) so fast, that sometimes highly-rated (but very stale) plugins aren't compatible with the latest versions of Rails. That's a problem I have had with agilewebdevelopment.com, which (I believe) is where Aptana RadRails pulls its list from.

Geez, the more I talk about it, the more I'm trying to make Rails Plugins into Java Jars, and script/plugin into apt or yum. :-p

I suppose I'm looking for a "Yahoo Portal" approach to Rails Plugins, where there's a well-maintained "Guided Tour" of what's available.

Google's great for when you know what you're looking for, but the Portal approach is far superior when you're just looking to browse the options, and want more Context-Sensitive links. Like if you're viewing "Acts as Solr", we'd get an Amazon-like block that reveals similar plugins, along with social-networked ratings.

My problem with Googling things is that there's just too much cruft in the Results to sift through... so it REALLY feels like I'm doing the digital equivalent of panning for gold. Search, scan top XX results, refine search, repeat ad-nauseum. Whereas with a Portal approach, I'd be drilling down into a groomed list of what others use and recommend.

I might have to bring this up at a Startup Weekend meeting, as this seems too big for a single Weekend. Just thinking about grafting a Bayesian clicktrail analyzer is starting to give me a headache. Or is there a plugin for that, too? "Acts as Amazon", maybe? :o)

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Permalink Reply by Doug Baker on June 24, 2009 at 10:15am

Perhaps by now you have seen ruby-toolbox.com? It doesn't compare plugins against similar ones, but it does rank them by popularity which is helpful.

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