EVE Technology Lab

a few years ago, in 2008, i decided to learn ruby (on rails). Whenever i start learning a language new to me, i pick a project and start. Back then i decided to start with a project called eve ranking (it does not exist anymore), and i needed a library to speak to the API.

There was already one existing API library, (Reve), but i decided i wanted to approach it with a different philosophie, and created EAAL.

i published the first version of EAAL December 2008, and over the years 10 more people have contributed to it.

for various reasons i turned my back on ruby a while later, and wrote a eaal-style implementation in PHP (pheal).

Now EAAL is very low maintenance due to the way it was build, the largest changes came when CAK where introduced to the EVE API, and they where done by other people. All i did was run a few tests, build a new gem and release it.

Last i checked, there was a few hundred downloads.


A few days ago i stumbled over coderbits.com, a website that ranks coders, by aggregating various informations from all over the web. When i registered there and browsed through the badges i got i was quite suprised, one of the highest batches i got was "gemologist" on level 4 - a badge for people who have more than 10k downloads on rubygems.

more than 10k downloads.

i checked my ruby gems account and found it was downloaded 10,250 times.

WTF?

one guess is that some of the downloads come from automated tools crawling rubygems, downloading all gems. But even then i guess EAAL is much more popular than i ever realized?

So im curious, who here is using EAAL, and what for? What applications are out there of this little library?