As part of a series of experiments with the Rails 3 beta, I’ve started gemifying a pile of plugin code we’re using. Rails Engines in Rails 3 are completely integrated into the framework (every Rails app is now a Rails::Engine!) so there are going to be some exciting times ahead as we start building modular apps which can be distributed with versioned gem dependencies. Part of the fun will be turning plugins into gems wherever possible, so that library code can be cleanly integrated into the modular apps, and everything is quick to set up at the start of a project.
The first fruit of this is the UploadColumn gem, which is just the venerable UploadColumn Plugin wrapped up and packaged as a rubygem. It works in the same way it always has, except that you can include it in your project by doing a:
sudo gem install uploadcolumn
and then a:
config.gem 'uploadcolumn', :lib => 'upload_column'
The code is forked out on Github, dive in and start hacking on it if you are an upload_column user. The tests must be for an earlier version of RSpec (they no longer run even in the canonical JNicklas repo), we’ll have to do some cleanup work when we get a chance.
