Java Gems Are Out There

I’ve finally finished the building of Raven’s Java Gem repository. It’s right there:

http://gems.rubyraven.org

In case you were wondering there’s exactly 11 256 gems. I think Rubyforge has about 5 000 of them so that’s HUGE! But there’s also a lot of junk, the Maven 2 repository isn’t what I would call clean, there’s some redundancy mostly due to package naming changes. So if you spot duplicates or bad gems, don’t hesitate to report it using Raven’s bug tracker.

I expect the repository to be useful not only for Raven, the availability of an index of almost all available Java artifacts is, IMO, invaluable for many usages. Just for the kick of it you can try:

gem install –source http://gems.rubyraven.org xstream-xstream

I’ve also published a new release for Raven, already 1.2.2! There’s no big change yet but it uses the new central Gem repository as a default for auto downloads. So instead of using gem, just create your project rakefile like the following:

dependency ‘compile_deps’ do |t|
    t.deps << [‘xstream’]
end
javac ‘compile’ => ‘compile_deps'

Download will automatically happen, picking the latest version. But this is a bad habit only useful for prototyping though, I would always recommend using explicit versions.