I love checking out new Ruby libraries, and recently many new ones have passed my eyes. The most prominent releases get their own post on Ruby Inside, but often there are less significant libraries that I'd struggle to write 100 words about yet still contribute to Ruby's lifeblood. This post aims to round up a selection of my recent discoveries.

RConfig - Powerful Ruby configuration management

RConfig, by Rahmal Conda, bills itself as a "complete solution for Ruby configuration management" and it certainly has a compelling feature-set. It supports YAML, XML, and properties files (a bit like INI files) and provides a short hand global access to application configurations in both enumeration-based and dot-notation/method forms. It also supports what it calls "overlays" where different configurations can be used within a single app (for different "environments", say). RConfig can be installed as a gem as it's hosted on Gemcutter.

Ruby-GMail - A Rubyesque interface to GMail

Ruby-GMail is an awesome new library by Daniel Parker that provides significant GMail-specific (Google Mail) functionality within your apps. You can read/retrieve e-mails via IMAP, fully handle attachments, deal with labels, mark items as spam/unread/read, and send e-mails (including MIME messages with images and attachments).

Excelsior - Super fast CSV parsing

Excelsior (GitHub) is a Ruby gem by Matthew Mongeau that binds to some C code that parses CSV (comma delimited) data very quickly. Matthew benchmarked Excelsior against the built in Ruby 1.9 'csv' parser (based on 1.8's FasterCSV) and a 1 million row CSV file was parsed in 4.44 seconds with Excelsior versus 54 seconds for the built-in library. As well as being a useful library, the source is useful to check out if writing a native extension of your own is of interest.

Linkedin - Ruby Bindings for the LinkedIn API

If you don't know about it, LinkedIn is basically a Facebook for business contacts and relationships. You get profiles, can message other people, and build up "connections" with other people (as an aside, if you want to add me - Peter Cooper - on your LinkedIn, my profile is here). Wynn Netherland has put together a tidy Ruby library to use LinkedIn's new API features. His blog post highlights some uses for it.

Ohm - Object-hash mapping library for Redis

Redis is one of a growing number of persistent key-value database systems, and Ohm is a library for storing objects in a Redis database. It was built by Citrusbyte - the team behind the Monk Ruby Web development framework. As an aside, Citrusbyte are looking for a software engineer to work with them in Los Angeles.

Alchemist - Conversion between units

Alchemist is another library by Matthew Mongeau. It makes it easy to convert between different units - such as from miles to meters or celsius to kelvin with code like 8.meters.to.miles or in operations like 10.kilometers + 1.mile. It was mentioned in an earlier Ruby Inside post but fits in well here too.

Nanotest - Super lightweight testing

Nanotest is, perhaps, the most lightweight testing library available for Rubyists today. Billing itself as "extremely minimal," it provides the bare minimum needed to test code in a constructive manner. When it was mentioned on RubyFlow recently, Nanotest got quite a bit of flack..

Savon - "Heavy metal" SOAP client library

Unlucky enough to need to use SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)? Savon presents a new, intriguing alternative to Soap4R (which few people seem to be particularly complimentary about). If your SOAP service is SOAP 1.1 compliant, has a WSDL file, and doesn't need WSSE authentication, you can be calling methods in just two lines of Ruby. You can do a lot more with further tweaks, however (including SOAP 1.2 and WSSE authentication).

Versionomy - A "version number" library

Versionomy by Daniel Azuma is a library that provides tools to represent, manipulate, parse, and compare version numbers in the wide variety of versioning schemes in use. In this sense, think of it as a Chronic for version numbers.