Throughout the course of building Tempo, we’ve relied heavily on software written by other people and made freely available. It’s worth doing a quick run-down to give credit where credit is due.
Ruby On Rails web application framework
No surprise there, right?
PostgreSQL relational database
Our favorite relational database system, Postgres is the most mature of the free systems out there, has the best feature set, and has quite a bit in common with Oracle. Highly recommended.
FamFamFam icons
Everybody needs icons, we’re big fans of the Silk set.
Acts As State Machine Rails plugin
This plugin by Scott Barron allows an ActiveRecord model to act as a finite state machine rather elegantly.
HAML & SASS HTML & CSS templating
Gone are the days when we painfully labor over HTML templates thanks to this great Rails plugin by Hampton Catlin. We can’t live without it now.
gchartrb Google Charts for Ruby
Those charts in Tempo look really good, but they’re largely the work of Google’s Chart API and this wrapper library for Ruby written by deepak.jois and aseemtandon. All we had to do was write some clever SQL and voila!
Active Merchant Rails plugin
Definitely the easiest way to integrate with a payment gateway in Rails. Also provides an awesome layer of abstraction in the event that we decide to switch gateways – we won’t have to do a major rewrite of the code in our site that handles payment processing.
Ruport Ruby Reports
Ruport made it incredibly easy for us to provide Excel/CSV and PDF exports from within Tempo’s WYSIWYG reporting interface.
RESTful Authentication Rails plugin
Very handy plugin by Rick Olson for quickly setting up an authentication system for your users that includes an activation step.
Thanks everyone for making these valuable open source contributions to make software like Tempo possible.