I’m a total newbie still plowing though people’s code and figuring
things
out in general.
One of the things I’ve been looking at are plugins and engines.
Although
I’m a newbie, I reached the conclusion that either approach really
leaves
much to be desired (also, since I need to learn about the underlying
code
instead of borrowing).
I totally agree with DHH that separation of “business logic” from the
framework is crucial and necessary to keep Rails from becoming “another
bloated framework ™”, yet at the same time web applications will
likely
share a lot of business logic to start with.
One idea, I’d like to ask you all about involves the extension of Rails
(in
other words, Rails would become a dependent library much like
ActiveRecord
is to Rails) itself with a separate “ruby gem” that will for this
example be
called “framework generator” or “framegen” for short.
The FG could be extended with other generators such as:
–login generator
–permissions
–forums
–blogs
and whatever else, but all of these components will be developed outside
FG
itself.
What this will do is extend rails so that you can build a skeleton rails
application with all of the above components integrated by throwing it
multiple parameters.
For example at the command line, you can type:
framegen rails_app_directory login blog forum permissions
That way you wont have to worry about porting various third-party
components, cluttering the Rails framework, or get a confusing directory
structure within your application but the skeleton components will be
integrated from the start.