Ruby Gems and Dependencies

As we commented before, one of the greatest advantages Ruby has is the great support and development around its community, allowing the developers to reduce unnecessary efforts using small software components called "Gems". The following list explains what is the purpose of each dependency

Framework and Security

• rails 4 The well-known web framework
• turbolinks gem for downloading the assets dynamically
• faker input fake data in the local database and make tests easier
• bcrypt-ruby A gem that helps you keep users passwords private and secure

Communications

• jbuilder library to handle JSON conversions
• faraday A neat library for making HTTP requests
• her A library used to create models and consume RESTful APIs

JavaScript

• therubyracer gem which embeds the V8 Javascript interpreter into Ruby
• jquery the brand popular library for DOM-manipulation and AJAX
• coffee to support CoffeeScript and compile it into JavaScript
• uglifier to minify the JavaScript source code
• d3-rails JavaScript library for graph visualization
• socket.io-rails JavaScript library for real time communication through Web Sockets

CSS and Styles

• sass-rails Sass is a pre-processor with more advanced features than simple CSS
• bootstrap-sass CSS Framework using the Sass pre-processor
• will_paginate Add pagination to the index windows
• will_paginate-bootstrap Style pagination with Bootstrap
• bootstrap-switch-rails Style checkboxes with Bootstrap

Testing

• sqlite Database in the backend
• rspec-rails The popular testing framework, RSpec
• selenium-webdriver WebDriver is a tool for writing automated tests of websites
• capybara Integration test framework which simulates how a user would interact with a website
• factory_girl_rails Definition of saved instances for testing purposes

Documentation

• sdoc Standalone Ruby documentation generator

Production Environment

• pg Gem for creating PostgreSQL database instances
• rails_12factor Helper gem to make easier the deployment of Rails apps on Heroku