I believe that testing is the most important part of the software development lifecycle. Nothing is ready unless it passes successfully all tests.

Meanwhile, I am trying to test as much aspects of my Rails application as possible. One such are the validations that I have on my models. To help my task on testing validations, I have created a gem that helps me out there.

You can find more details here:

Validator Attachment

Your comments are welcome.

Since I have started developing applications with Ruby on Rails, I have used again and again some very useful gems. Here they are:

• bundler: The gem dependency resolver and manager.
• mysql2: The ActiveRecord adapter for MySQL. MySQL is my personal preference for database server.
• fast_gettext, gettext_i18n_rails, gettext: For I18n.
• routing-filter: I used this one in one of my multilingual applications, when I wanted my paths to include the locale.
• foreigner: Allows me to declare foreign keys in my migrations.
• nilify_blanks: Very useful to convert empty parameter values to nulls and avoid storing empty strings in db where it should be null.
• jquery-rails: For jQuery used in rails.
• settingslogic: For run-time configuration settings.
• dynamic_form: For “error_messages_for” in my views.
• kaminari: For pagination in my index views.
• unicode: For Unicode support which is missing in ruby 1.8 (available in 1.9).
• rmagick, carrierwave: For image uploading and resizing.
• acts_as_list: For lists that I want to be able to easily reposition their items.
• sitemap_generator: Usefull gem to let you generate sitemap files.

Especially for development and testing:

• mongrel: A web server adequate for development and better than Webrick.
• web-app-theme: A layout for quick start of my web fron end.
• ruby-debug, ruby-debug-ide: For debugging from within my IDE (Intellij)
• mocha: For Moching and Stubbing
• single_test: To be able to run a single test from the command line
• cucumber-rails, database_cleaner: For Cucumber tests.