A New Useless Gem
During Thanksgiving break I had fun with a friend of mine working on a Ruby challenge while digesting the traditional turkey.
The challenge was quite simple, create a small library that can generate random words from the English dictionary.
But of course there was a twist. One should be able to choose the total amount of characters, the amount of words and the separator between the words. However we both had a word list.
I personally decided to use SQlite3 to store the words after parsing the text file if the database is empty.
It was a good exercise and it got me to play with SQLite and one of the Ruby adapter library. Once I was done, I decide to play with DrNic cool Gem generator.
Nic is my favorite Aussie’s Rubyist (ok, I don’t know many) and I’ve been wanting to check on this lib for a very long time. And I have to say he did an awesome job! Writing a Ruby Gem has never that easy! And on top of that the generator creates RSpec examples (or test/unit tests), a basic website for your gem and has a bunch of rake tasks to deploy your newly created gem.
Feel free to check the source code:
https://random-word-gen.rubyforge.org/svn/
By the way, I did find an almost useful use for this gem. Activation code generator. You know, the kind of string your receive on by email or SMS to activate a feature or an account. It’s always a pain to type a MD5Hash string, while, when using the word generator, the string is made of existing words, making the process way more user friendly.
I also plan on adding some random copyleft text to the sqlite db so the Gem will be able to generate titles, paragraphs and random quotes. I’m just tired of reading lorem ipsum and on top of that, I get to it, I might had text in various languages so you check if your app breaks when using another char set, or if your layout can’t handle too much text.
Honestly, I don’t expect you to use this gem, but I jut wanted to encourage people to start writing their own gem, the process is super easy and rewarding. And actually, feel free to try the challenge and post a link to your implementation in the comments. (That’s seriously, the best way to learn)
p.s: I’m sorry about my RSS feed constantly being reset, it seems to be a problem with Mephisto, my blog engine and we are trying to figure out what’s going on.