CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/ch1 1w24 nv

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Some important Gems that are useful in RAILS environment

There are many gems which provide easy of functionality that can be included in the rails development environment. Bundleris a useful gem that enables a developer to quickly add and manage gems in a few lines of code.

We can classify the Gems based on the usage in different layers Model, View and Controller.

MODEL layer

Active Record Plugins

• oracle-enhanced Oracle "enhanced" ActiveRecord adapter contains useful additional methods for working with new and legacy Oracle databases. This adapter is superset of original ActiveRecord Oracle adapter.

• activerecord-jdbc-adapter AR-JDBC is a database adapter for Rails' ActiveRecord component designed to be used with JRuby built upon Java's JDBC API for database access. It allows to connect to virtually any JDBC-compliant database with your JRuby on Rails application.

• nulldb A database backend that translates database interactions into no-ops. Using NullDB enables you to test your model business logic - without ever touching a real database.

• oracle-enhanced-enhanced It includes several enhancements and customization to the standard ActiveRecord Oracle Enhanced adapter, which is still required. Any customization to this adapter's behavior or additional Oracle-specific utilities should be added here.

• Other useful Ruby Gems here. activerecord-sqlserver-adapter, activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter, activerecord-jdbcpostgresql-adapter, activerecord-jdbcderby-adapter,.

Active Record Index Assistants

• foreigner Adds helpers to migrations and dumps foreign keys to schema.rb.

• rails_indexes A rake task to track down missing database indexes. does not assume that all foreign keys end with the convention of _id.

• schema_plus SchemaPlus is an ActiveRecord extension that provides enhanced capabilities for schema definition and querying, including: enhanced and more DRY index capabilities, support and automation for foreign key constraints, and support for views.

• automatic_foreign_key Automatic Foreign Key automatically generates foreign-key constraints when creating tables or adding columns. It uses SQL-92 syntax and as such should be compatible with most databases that support foreign-key constraints.

• Other useful Ruby Gems here. ambitious_query_indexer, lol_dba, immigrant, redhillonrails_core,.

Rails DB Bootstrapping

• seed-fu Seed Fu is an attempt to once and for all solve the problem of inserting and maintaining seed data in a database. It uses a variety of techniques gathered from various places around the web and combines them to create what is hopefully the most robust seed data system around.

• populator Mass populate an Active Record database.

• seedbank Extends Rails seeds to split out complex seeds into multiple files and lets each environment have it's own seeds.

• alter ego Has alter ego has_alter_ego makes it possible to keep seed and live data transparently in parallel. In contrast to other seed data approaches has_alter_ego synchronizes the seed definitions with your database objects automagically unless you've overridden it in the database.

Data Persistence