Vinsol owes a lot to the open source projects and community.
And in our own way to “Pay it Forward” we like to release a lot of reusable code to the open source community.
Recently we have release a few gems and rails plugins. Here is a brief description of these.
vPayPal
Our first main contribution to open source was the vPayPal gem at RubyForge. This was extracted by Ritu from a project which was using Paypal for merchant transactions. This gem has not seen much active development since long, because of other more exhaustive libraries like ActiveMerchant.
Simple Captcha
It was extracted by Sur Max from work done at Vinsol and then enhanced further to be released as a Rails Plugin. Here is what Sur says about simple captcha in his blog.
Simple Captcha written in ruby, is a plugin for ruby on rails applications and provides the captcha based authentication functionality for ror applications. It can be implemented quite easily for either controller or model based captcha. Simple Captcha provides the option of selecting the style of image out of various image styles.
More details on Simple Captcha are available here. http://expressica.com/simple_captcha/
Validate Attributes
It was also extracted by Sur Max from work done at Vinsol and then enhanced further to be released as a Rails Plugin. Here is the description of Validate Attributes from Sur’s blog
Validate Attributes is a RubyonRails plugin which provides a way to extend the functionality of the the rails’ activerecord function valid?. Using this plugin, we can validate any specific attribute(s) or we can skip validating any specific attribute(s).
More details on Validate Attributes are available here. http://expressica.com/plugins/validate_attributes
State Select
It is a Rails Plugin extracted and enhanced by Akhil and with contributions for states from other countries by the users. This plugin allows to create drop down list for states, just as country_select helper method in rails. Curently it can generate state list for India, US, Canada, Australia, Spain and Uganda(default is US).
Read more about the state select plugin on Akhil’s blog here
Travel Mate
Opera widget developed by Aditya using JavaScript as an open source project provides important information and utility tools to travelers like road map, weather report, currency converter, world time and more. Travel Mate code extensively uses Yahoo User Interface library and APIs from highly reputed sources.
Travel Mate is being reviewed and listed by popular Internet portals like Download.com, Softpedia.com and Yahoo Gallery . Travel Mate has also won a Windows Mobile Phone in Opera Travel Widget Contest
Check Travel Mate’s Official Blog for latest updates