Rails Study Apps

I’m trying to pick up some rails in my spare time. Been plugging away at my pet project when I can, which leads to a lot of googling while I do it. If one of my known Rubyist friends is at a Code and Coffee session, I spend a fair amount of time picking their brains and pairing up to learn what I can in an hour or so.

That all works pretty well, but at my pace I’ll be forever getting my Ruby code to look less like C# and more like Ruby. So, as Steve blogged recently, why not find a few Rails apps to read? So, I hit up my twitter friends: http://twitter.com/timwingfield/status/6464205602

I got three pretty good responses, and finally got time tonight to pull them down and take a quick look at them. I don’t have a lot of info on any of them, but I did browse the source to get a feel for what was going on.

Radiant CMS

http://github.com/radiant/radiant

This one was recommended by Dugald Wilson. Decent amount of code here to look at, and uses RSpec for the test framework. This one definitely fit the bill for what I was after.

Spot.us

http://github.com/spot-us/spot-us

I got this one as a tag team recommendation from Scott Walker and Matt Darby. This is a non-profit company doing Community Funded Reporting and is coming from the folks at Hashrocket. More RSpec out of this project, and again a fair amount of code to pour over.

Redmine

http://github.com/edavis10/redmine

The third one came through Ben Wagaman. This one uses TestUnit instead of RSpec, but still some decent reading. I’m going to have to dig into the tests a bit more on this one, though, because the file names aren’t jumping out at me as model/controller/etc type tests. But, that’s the point of this exercise, to see what other folks are doing.

I’ve got a little flying and a lot of driving ahead of me this weekend, hopefully I get some time to dive deeper into what each of these apps is up to, and get some more Rails code under my belt.

If you’ve come across a few more open source Rails apps out there, please drop a link in the comments.