Perhaps in part because it's now working with MinGW for Windows and Snow Leopard, though the official release for these platforms is yet to come out.

http://lylejohnson.name/blog/2009/10/20/newly-supported-buil...

Many Ruby developers are so Mac-centric that they don't realize how popular Ruby is on Windows. The Ruby One-click installer is the single most downloaded archive on RubyForge, with more than twice the number of downloads than even Ruby Gems.

If FXRuby works with the Ruby provided by the One-click Installer, then it's going to get a lot of downloads, because while Windows may not be the ideal platform for Ruby server apps, it's a good platform for desktop apps, at least if you want to have a lot of users.

Can't find the post right now, but there was an issue to where rubyforge syncs were counting towards the download graph. This has been fixed but the data wasn't changed, so yeah, this graph is skewed.

I chatted with head Gemcutter Nick Quaranto (qrush) on IRC a week or so ago about this and it appears to be a bot or what-have-you that is mirroring all of the Win32 binary gems for FXRuby--even versions that are years old! So no, these stats are not representative of reality.

Assuming gemcutter.org does become the preferred source for all gem downloads, it's safe to assume that downloads of Rails (and other known popular gems) will surpass this in due time. In the meantime I've given Nick my blessing to "filter" those download statistics as he sees fit to make them more realistic.

Because why_ is no longer writing Shoes?

_why may not be, but many others are:

http://github.com/shoes/shoes

Given that Gemcutter is a relatively new service, my first guess would be the graph is skewed if they switched to gemcutter before other popular Ruby projects (more so if FXRuby is a dependancy for another popular gem which is hosted elsewhere)

Then again, their download page http://www.fxruby.org/downloads.html only mentions RubyForge..

Haml, the 10th most downloaded gem on there, still hasn't switched to Gemcutter.

I really don't think it matters. Rails and its gems will most likely surpass it in no time: http://gems.rubyforge.org/stats.html

Why not wxRuby?

I think it was a bot run amok.