rubyrubygems

What does gem mean?


I am struggling with the concept gem. What does it mean? On jumpstart tutorial I read this

Steve Klabnik, an instructor for Jumpstart, created the sunlight-congress gem.

http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/projects/eventmanager.html

What he really did? Did he created the website? Did he created a gem for a website that is already existed?

What do you do when you say

gem 'sunlight-congress'


Solution

  • In Ruby, a gem is nothing but a distributed code packaged as a library created by Ruby developer(s). The idea is to keep a particular functionality of code into a library but Ruby does it more beautifully by letting Ruby developers host it on http://rubygems.org/ and library then can used by others. For more information read: http://guides.rubygems.org/what-is-a-gem/