Engines aka 'productizing'

[Nicholas Henry]

Admittedly I haven't done any development yet with Merb, but was
considering trying it out for a new development project. As many of
you may know, extracting slices of functionality controllers, models,
views etc is hard work in Rails (ok, maybe not that hard), hence the
many attempts of providing this functionality in the forms of engines,
plugems etc. Could any one shed any light on how this is handled in
Merb. Thank you in advance.

[Paul Barry]

Long answer:  Yeah, this has been on my list of something to check out as well.  I'm hoping it's a simple as creating a gem that has some kind of initializer hook that adds a directory to the controller_path, model_path, and template_path, or whatever the equivalent of that in merb is.  The fact that you can specify the order that you want the gems to be loaded in and what versions of each gem you want would be very helpful for this kind of thing.  Hopefully I can get around to looking into this sometime soon, but if anyone has an insight as to the theoretical feasibility of this or even better examples of this that they can point to, that would be helpful.

Short answer: +1 :)

[Jed Hurt]

I've been wondering about this as well. If anyone makes headway on this, they should start a page on the wiki.

[Ben]

I'm also in favor of this. I blogged about this a while ago (see link
below). I talked about my frustrations with multi-app rails and some
ideas how to fix it.

I also tried to use a rack middleware (URLMap) to wire together two merb
--flat apps, but I haven't had much success.

+1 for addressing this and +1 for adding it to the wiki. :) Hopefully we
can come up with a solution without crutches.

http://ducktyped.com/2008/1/4/the-great-ruby-web-framework-multi-app-challenge

Ben

[Julian Leviston]

Why can't you just roll one "app" per "bit", and have a "connecting"
app that consumes the api's of the other "object" apps? All restful.

Julian.

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[Jed Hurt]

I added a wiki page: http://wiki.merbivore.com/pages/multi-app-support

I'm excited to see what comes of this. I'm dying to dive into it myself, but it will be a while before I have the time. Godspeed!

[felix]

When Merb was just beginning I was running with the HEAD revision and
had a 'multi-app' app happening alright. It got a little difficult
keeping up with the changes in trunk (once a week was probably a
little too infrequent to checkout!).

I eventually made a multi-domain backend and created a plugin for each
domain's frontend. This worked alright for a while but I it got
difficult to ensure all the frontends 'upgraded' cleanly when I added
new features etc.

I now just develop front and back ends in one app and throw hardware
at it if it needs it. Merb would be the perfect way to do this
'productize' thing, though. I am very interested.

+1

-felix

[Michael Klishin]

2008/5/5 felix <felix....@gmail.com>:

> I now just develop front and back ends in one app and throw hardware
> at it if it needs it. Merb would be the perfect way to do this
> 'productize' thing, though. I am very interested.
>
> +1

Felix,

Given you have some experience with what I prefer to call "subapplications",
do you have any ideas how to improve Merb Parts?
--
MK

[Nicholas Henry]

So it looks like "Slices" is the answer to this:

http://wiki.merbivore.com/pages/slices

On May 5, 11:26 am, "Michael Klishin" <michael.s.klis...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> 2008/5/5 felix <felix.mcc...@gmail.com>: