Open source Rails apps to study and learn from | Hacker News Reader

Open source Rails apps to study and learn from

blog.chrislowis.co.uk

127 pointschrislo13 comments

I don't agree with this list. Spot.us, for instance, has completely non-standard controller code that goes against widely accepted conventions. I also haven't looked at lovd by less in a while, but last I checked they relied on widespread monkey patching of core Ruby and Rails classes just to avoid writing a couple characters.

Also very notably absent is gemcutter (http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter) which is actually clean, modern and adheres to conventions.

Agreed. I've heard (yet have no evidence) that Lovd was a particularly bad example of Rails code. I haven't reviewed it personally though, so ymmv.

I just took a glance at a couple controllers in the lovd source, and they do just look like generic scaffold controllers.

Even though I haven't heard of it, just from the 439 watchers and 96 forks on Github, I'd probably look to it as an example of at least decent code.

This is why I <3 Github - really great way to learn good coding conventions.

There are only a handful of active lovd by less forks and none of them have apparently removed the pervasive, unnecessary monkey patching.

If you don't know what I'm referring to, start reading the code, notice that there are a bunch of weird, non-standard methods that don't seem to be defined anywhere and notice that core classes don't work the way you expect. Then, maybe you'll end up needing to do what I had to, grep the project to find all the monkey patching here: http://github.com/stevenbristol/lovd-by-less/tree/master/ven...

That mostly undocumented plugin, which introduces changes used extensively throughout the app, is not the kind of thing that should be presented to new Rails developers as a good practice.

Aside from the monkey patching, lovd by less does provide some very good examples of how to approach a variety of things in Rails, but the monkey patching is so pervasive that it's unavoidable.

This is a great point. I'm the author of the original article, I'll update to link to specific concerns and also add a couple of the projects that some other people have suggested.

The article was in no way meant to be a definitive resource, just an attempt to continue helping new Rails developers learn how to work with the framework. The many useful comments I've received will help improve the article a lot.

Great.

I'll reiterate that I recommend highlighting gemcutter. qrush and the contributors have done an excellent job with it, it contains examples of how to approach a variety of tasks (even has examples of using metal, middleware and embeddable sinatra), the code is clear and adheres to conventions and it's used in a real production app that every Ruby developers has contact with.

Take a look at Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://www.railstutorial.org/). The sample application, a tiny Twitter clone, is designed to be fully up-to-date in coding style (though of course it reflects some of my particular idiosyncrasies). I just finished the Rails 2.3 book last week, so a definitive version of the source isn't ready yet, but there will be one eventually. (I'm focusing on the Rails 3 version first.)

On the other hand, if you want to follow the tutorial and make a definitive version of the code yourself (preferably with tags for each chapter end), I'd be happy to throw it up on GitHub. And you might just get a nod in the acknowledgments. ;-)

Gitorious is an open source alternative to github.com hosted on it's own site http://gitorious.org/gitorious

It was recently ported to rails 3 as well.

Anybody have a good list for python?

For Django-based apps - you should definitely take a look at Pinax http://pinaxproject.com/

Satchmo has some interesting approaches to solving certain problems in Django (like allowing to override general site settings in admin) - http://www.satchmoproject.com/

For examples of more lightweight WSGI apps using Werkzeug:

Zine (blogging engine) - http://zine.pocoo.org/

Solace (forum similar to StackOverflow) - http://opensource.plurk.com/Solace/

Another canonical example is Everyblock: http://code.google.com/p/ebcode/

also check out http://communityengine.org/ as an good, open-source alternative to lovdbyless.

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