Rails 3 has been out quite a while in "rails" time. Back in the world of rails 2 most custom code was added via rails plugins stored in the vendor directory. Although this allowed for a clean dependency relationship when new versions of plugins came out it made it difficult to upgrade existing code bases. So when it came time to upgrade to rails 3 this contributed to a lot of people having difficultly upgrading their existing codebases. Along came the new revised rails 3 engine...

Every developer has experienced an episode of painful dependency management.  Missing libs, "dll hell," and hours of wasted effort.  Been there. It's painful.

Luckily for those working in the Ruby ecosystem, there is a nice tool that helps with dependency management: RubyGems.

In this post we'll dive a little deeper into how RubyGems works with your Ruby code to properly load and manage gems.  Understanding the load process will better prepare you when things...