I wish people would take a little time to consider the best way to arrange and comment the gem insertions in Gemfile.<\/p>\n
I am not a great fan of commenting. I believe you should code so that it is easily readable without comments. When I see comments, I tend to think “There’s a bit of code that the developer doesn’t think people will be able to understand”. Commented methods are usually the ones in prime need of refactoring.<\/p>\n
However, there are times where you have little option but to use unintuitive code patterns and a short comment is then required.<\/p>\n
One of the best examples of this, and one where I rarely see any comments is the Gemfile. All the team developed rails apps I have worked on, have a range of different gems. I sometimes wonder whether most rails developers measure their skill level on the number of gems they can add to the Gemfile. It’s certainly become an interview criteria!<\/p>\n
Many gems have functionality that is not obvious from their name. For example, nokogiri (Japanese symbol for ‘saw’ I believe), is not a name that makes it obvious to me that it is an html parser. I do not think that is the fault of the gem developer. You have to come up with a unique name, and that is not easy. Especially if you want to make it memorable.<\/p>\n
It is usually fairly easy to find the gem’s project in github and\/or via a google search, and then to find out what it does. It is very rare for a commonly used gem not to have at least a basic description of its functionality in its README (polyamorous being one exception).<\/p>\n
The problem is do you really want to have to look up every gem README when you are scanning through a Gemfile looking for where some functionality you don’t recognise, may be added. Some short comments can make this task so much easier.<\/p>\n
I’m working on an application that uses Postgres, and the models are being queried with search_by_title_and_body, and I couldn’t see where the search_by functionality was coming in. It took me a few minutes looking through the Gemfile and look up READMEs, to find that ‘texticle’ was the source. This was far down in the Gemfile and amongst unrelated gems.<\/p>\n
So I moved it to the ‘pg’ gem declaration and added a comment. I did the same for ‘activerecord-postgis-adapter’:<\/p>\n
Now I hope the next developer who reads the Gemfile, will find it a little easier to identify the functionality being added by these gems.<\/p>\n
There is now a gem call grub<\/a><\/strong>, that will automatically add comments to you Gemfile. I’d highly recommend you have a look at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I wish people would take a little time to consider the best way to arrange and comment the gem insertions in Gemfile. I am not a great fan of commenting. I believe you should code so that it is easily … Continue reading