Authlogic -- gem or plugin?

Rails
1

Trying out Authlogic for the first time – somewhere, can’t find it now
of course :slight_smile: I saw a recommendation to use the plugin form, but the
Ryan B. railscast recommends the gem (without explanation).

Comments or recommendations?

TIA,

Hassan S. ------------------------ [email protected]
twitter: @hassan

2

Trying out Authlogic for the first time – somewhere, can’t find it
now
of course :slight_smile: I saw a recommendation to use the plugin form, but the
Ryan B. railscast recommends the gem (without explanation).

I’m using it as a plugin and it’s working fine for me…

3

I’m using the gem without issues…

If you use the GEM you will get a gem version installed so that you
can stay consistent between environments (dev, test, pre-prod,
prod… )

Iif you want the latest and greatest you need to use the plugin…

4

The argument for the gem is that any improvements in security/bug
fixes will be automatically included in your application if you
continue to update your gems. The argument for the plugin is any
changes in the gem won’t break your code that was already working if
you don’t update your plugin.

I would use the updating gem in development. And a frozen plugin in
deployed app.

On Oct 18, 1:43 pm, Hassan S. [email protected]

5

Hassan S. wrote:

Trying out Authlogic for the first time – somewhere, can’t find it now
of course :slight_smile: I saw a recommendation to use the plugin form, but the
Ryan B. railscast recommends the gem (without explanation).

Comments or recommendations?

I believe that Ryan tends to prefer using gem dependencies instead of
plugins when possible. This is also my own preference. I would guess
that there is no further explanation provided because it seems to depend
upon personal preference.

I tend to prefer managing shared libraries outside of my application. I
feel it eases management of shared libraries and makes upgrading my
applications to use the newer version easier. Plus it also reduces the
amount of code that lives inside my project (and hence my version
control system). I don’t really see the necessity to version control
shared library code.

It is also my understanding that Rails 3 will contain some improvements
to the way gem dependencies are currently handled.

6

I’ve had projects break before when I’ve updated plugins (my own and
others’). It’s a little more clear what version of a gem you have
installed versus a plugin, which may or may not be the most recent
revision.

On Oct 19, 10:54 am, Robert W. [email protected]

7

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Aaron B. [email protected]
wrote:

The argument for the gem is that any improvements in security/bug
fixes will be automatically included in your application if you
continue to update your gems. The argument for the plugin is any
changes in the gem won’t break your code that was already working if
you don’t update your plugin.

This isn’t 100% true because I can call-out the version to use within my
environment.rb file. For example,

config.gem “sqlite3-ruby”, :lib => “sqlite3”, :version => “1.2.5”

Now, I can ‘gem update’ without causing issues for my application. The
bundler gem will replace the above in Rails 3. For now, this has worked
great in development and production.

-Conrad