[MacRuby-devel] PBI - MacRuby aux Fines Merbs...

Rich Morin rdm at cfcl.com
Tue Nov 11 22:13:15 PST 2008


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 at cfcl.com
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog     +1 650-873-7841

Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development


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