Just two months ago we posted about Gemcutter, a new RubyGem hosting repository that, we said, was "taking aim at RubyForge and GitHub." It only took six weeks for GitHub to give up on building gems and to start recommending Gemcutter instead. Today, RubyForge is toppled also. Gemcutter developer Nick Quaranto has announced that Ruby Central has given the thumbs up to replacing http://gems.rubyforge.org/ with http://rubygems.org/ (the new Gemcutter URL) as the default gem host in RubyGems.

The transition from RubyForge to Gemcutter/RubyGems.org isn't an overnight deal and gem publishing from RubyForge will continue to work for the time being, but within the next couple of months, RubyForge accounts will be merged with Gemcutter and an update will be made to change the canonical gem source (though, of course, you can use Gemcutter already if you like by following their instructions).

What all of this means for you as a Ruby developer is that if you want to release your own RubyGems (or "gems") in future, things will become a lot easier. Gemcutter, if you haven't checked it out, is definitely a refined evolution in terms of gem hosting - you can "push" a built gem to their server with a single command. If you want to learn how, check out Ryan Bates' awesome Gemcutter & Jeweler screencast that demonstrates how to create a gem and deploy it with Gemcutter.

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