what is the best to use - ruby gems or ruby plugins

Question

What is the best practice when creating a rails project

1 - is it good to use ruby gems 2 - or is it good to use ruby plugins (as almost all the gems has their plugin versions)

and what are the strengths and weaknesses of eachoption

• consider we are creating the rails project with rails 2.x.x or rails 3

thanks in advance

cheers, sameera

Answer 1

I think you should have to go with gems if possible. You will have a rich framework with slim applications. If you use a lot of plugins your application will be too heavy. I'm talking from experience. I have an application with a lot of plugins in it and it is hell slow.