The reason the focus was taken off the login/user engines is because I
felt that it was important to distinguish between
a) using the engines plugin as a tool for more powerful reuse in your
own development
and
b) providing a set of drop in components.
The point is that the engines-plugin is much less usefull without the
availability of drop in components.
The former is the more correct, and the latter what inspires all the
negative attention that engines recieve. This does not in any way
prohibit other people from speaking about or promoting any of those
specific engines; just that I no longer have the time or energy to
fight the uphill struggle against thought-followers who believe that
engines are just the login/user engines, are high level components,
are evil, and so on.
The anti-engines arguments are just plain stupid, because they assume
that everyone is smart enough to, or has time to implement yet another
perfect user-system. Especially the Login-engine just works, and
extendability is neat as it is. And sometimes worse is just better (as
Chad F. said in a presentation in Delft lately).
If code-reuse is usefull between your own projects then it most likely
is also between projects of different people. Sharing code is the core
of Open Source, and Engines allow this in a neat, aspect-oriented way.
It just must be clear that engines are to be opiniated and have
convention over configuration, just like Rails itself.
Note also that Engines are a great resource for Rails-Noobs to learn
from, to borrow code from, or to get started with.
Regarding login or user engines, at the moment, I’m not very happy
with them because they represent old code (much of which I didn’t
even write) which isn’t as nice to use as I might like. Others are
already on the case here (search this list for ‘hark’, for instance,
and of course there is ActiveRBAC). I’d much prefer it if I personally
could focus on the development of the engines plugin, and leave the
actual engine implementations to others in the community. What do you
think?
I think that rails-engines.org could be a lot more usefull, and gain a
lot more positive attention if it also listed available engines. Now I
am not saying that it should immediately become the freshmeat.net for
rails engines, but a simple list, as there was on the old site, would
already be much better.
sense as a coherent, single package, and they got a few things quite
wrong in their recent criticism - see my reply on rails-engines.org if
you’re interested.
I already read that blog-post, and your reply yesterday. I agree that
the engines-plugin offers a coherent set of features, but I think that
now with plugins being able to do most things engines do, the idea of
engines becomes even more important than the engines-plugin itself.
Making rails-engines.org less defensive in its tone, and making it a
place where people can find engines too, seems a good step to me.
Wybo
