ducktyped

Many websites are composed of several fairly independent apps that would still benefit from tighter integration than running them as separate apps. Here's a typical site: core site, forum, blog/cms (or photo management app, etc).

The typical Rails response to multi-app integration is one of the following two: 1. "Just run them as separate apps on different subdomains and share the database." or 2. "Use the app as the base and add your own code to it." I have integrated several Rails apps, and it is dirty and inefficient, a real pain in the ass, especially compared to the joy of doing most other things with Ruby/Rails. The failure of multi-app Rails is documented by the plethora of hacks used to emulate multi-app behaviors: generators, engines, appable plugins, and the multi-app routing plugin.

The point of this post is not to rip on rails, it's just what I'm primarily using, and I would love to see other Ruby web frameworks such as merb, ramaze, and the micro-frameworks think about multi-app while they can still make major changes. Ruby is powerful enough to elegantly enable multi-app configurations.