RubyGems hits 5,000 downloads
RubyGems is one of the best things that have emerged while I've been Rubying. It's the equivalent of CPAN + apt-get as a repository for Ruby libraries and applications. It has been gaining speed fast and currently holds 111 distinct gems, which is about 10% of the number that age-old Ruby Application Archive has in store — impressive and fast take up!
Even more impressively, though, is the uptake among users. Chad has just announced that more than 5,000 copies of RubyGems have been downloaded and more than 20,000 gems have been retrieved! I'm incredibly proud to see that Rails is responsible for at least 1/4 of all gems downloaded.
I can't wait until RubyGems is part of the standard library. Now that the release of Ruby 1.8.2 seems to be taking longer than first anticipated, it would be fantastic if RubyGems made it in before release. Are you listening, Matz :)?
While we await inclusion in the standard library, let's make the world of gems even more exciting. I for one would bless anyone that would make these libraries available as gems: FastCGI, MySQL/Ruby, Posgres/Ruby. Those three are currently the only non-gem libraries I have installed.
