I’ve written about Rails Rumble previously, the 48 hour event where teams turn an idea into a web application using Ruby on Rails. I was surprised to see the completeness of some of the applications that were developed this year as well as the utility of the ideas they implemented.

One of the more interesting articles I’ve seen in relation to Rails Rumble analysed the prevalence of various plug-ins and gems that teams utilised.

After a quick look there are a few points that specifically interest me :

• jQuery is the most used Javascript library, even though it isn’t the default included with Rails. I think this says a lot about where jQuery fits in the client side coding space these days. Under further scrutiny it seems clear that jQuery had an even larger base of use than shown in that graph, as explained here.
• 1 in 3 teams used a skeleton application. All of those teams used Bort. That’s a pretty overwhelming statistic for two reasons. Firstly it means you should be looking at using skeleton applications if you aren’t already. Secondly anything that you develop that could be used in other applications should possibly be a gem or plug-in. Reuse doesn’t seem to be something you just talk about anymore.
• Over 50% of people wrote tests as part of their application, and the majority of people used a Behaviour Driven Development framework such as Shoulda or rSpec (they got rSpec!). Keep in mind that even on a tight schedule most people using Rails are writing tests!
• Over a third of applications offered OpenID support for authentication. Given I don’t even remember where I signed up for OpenID this surprises me. Maybe it’s time to join this bandwagon?

I think the article gives a good indicator where you should look to implement certain parts of your application. Generally speaking, if a lot of passionate developers are using a particular library or piece of code then you’d be wise to make the same choice.