Merb <3 MacRuby During RubyConf, Laurent, Yehuda, Rich and myself were talking about how to work closer. We were thinking about maybe running Merb on MacRuby so we could introspect a dev app and see what's going on. A bit like the iPhone dev tools. We are also looking at simpler MacRuby apps such as Merb News, Merb Doc but also integration with merb-messenger (feature being developed and offering communcation via jabber/growl/email/other protocol between a running app and one or many clients). Anyway, my point is that I totally agree with you ;) -Matt On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 1:13 AM, Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> wrote:

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

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