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

[Eloy Duran]

> * 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.

One thing the “cowboys”, from Rails for instance, have done right
is that there are tests for almost everything,
which is something that is seriously lacking atm imo.

As I already discussed with Laurent, I especially would like to see
full test/spec coverage for HotCocoa, because:
(A) I think it's a good thing to do in any case, but that's just my  
opinion.
(B) More importantly, HotCocoa will probably be the part of MacRuby
that most rubyists will hack/contribute on. Without a full test suite
it takes too much time to make it enjoyable for people to quickly  
write a good patch,
because one has to trace through all the code.

To put the money where my mouth is; I have started on writing specs  
for HotCocoa
and will commit them once I feel it's a good enough starting point.  
(There's never enough time…)

I would really like to hear the opinions from the main HotCocoa  
committers on this.

PS: Credits to Laurent who has been making an effort on writing more  
and more tests for
the core part of MacRuby! :)

> * large, well-documented APIs
>
>   In a community dominated by a web framework (Rails) that
>   has no defined API, I think this is quite noteworthy.


Serious??
I have not yet seen any well documented API in MacRuby, I must have  
missed it.
Could you explain which one(s) you mean?

> 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?

These will at least be covered by Rucola again, once I have ported it  
to MacRuby.
But because this will be quite an effort I would like to know from  
Laurent/Rich
if we will not be duplicating functionality.

- Eloy