IMHO, MacRuby and Merb are two of the most interesting current developments in the Ruby arena. Because I've been looking at both of them, I started noticing some similarities, including: * Focus on design and engineering In an age of "cowboy programming", I find it refreshing to see that some programming projects actually embrace design and engineering. * large, well-documented APIs In a community dominated by a web framework (Rails) that has no defined API, I think this is quite noteworthy. * MVC-based UI frameworks Both MacRuby and Merb can both be used for purposes other than interactive UI development (eg, batch-mode applications, web services). However, their focus is on UI and both use an MVC-based approach (though the specifics vary markedly). Anyway, I started wondering whether any parts of Merb might be useful for MacRuby to consider adopting. For example: * Merb, like Rails, defines conventions for directory layout. Would it make sense for MacRuby to have similar conventions? * Merb stresses modularity very strongly, using gems to add "plugins", "slices", etc. What kinds of modularity should we encourage for MacRuby, HotCocoa, etc? * Some of Merb's plugins add functionality (eg, DataMapper) which might be useful in a MacRuby application. Would it be useful for MacRuby to be able to use Merb plugins? Comments solicited... -r -- http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume rdm@cfcl.com http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841 Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development