ViewGem, a Little Script

2008-08-10

What do you do when you need figure out what’s going on inside a gem, or just get a feel for its API?

I don’t use generated documentation to help me solve problems — often the library’s author and I disagree about what’s important to mention, and/or the documentation is fairly non-existent. Hey, I can’t whine… this stuff is free.

While I don’t necessarily agree with my esteemed colleague Adam Keys on his hypothesis that comments are a bad smell, I can definitely state that many smell bad. The fact they get generated into a prettier format also doesn’t help much… and well, we all know how often User’s Manuals and the like get updated.

Just get me to the code already!

Here’s a little script

Update 2008-12-23: Just use the gemedit gem :-)

Discussion

Bruce Williams is a professional software developer based out of Portland, Oregon. An early adopter of Ruby, he writes, speaks, and codes in the language for fun and profit, but as a restless language addict, spends much of his time backpacking through the wilds of other languages and paradigms.

In the rare instances when Bruce is without a computer, he finds enjoyment as an avid photographer and amateur chef.

Projects

RTeX: Ruby -> PDFLaTeX Bridge
Bumpspark: _why's pure Ruby PNG sparkline library, rescued from the jaws of random disappearance
KeywordSearch: GMail-style key/value parsing
Paginator: Generic, framework-agnostic pagination for Ruby
Various FiveRuns Projects

Talks & Slides

New in Ruby 1.9 (Boston.rb)
Ruby 1.9: What's New and Why it Matters (LSRC 2008)
Migrating to Ruby 1.9 (SOR 2008)
Introduction to Ruby (SOR 2008, Charity Tutorial)