I just wanted to complement you for taking the very honorable route
of suggesting both your frameworks and various competing frameworks.
It makes the community much more friendly and acknowledges that
each of the frameworks have their own merits. Too often people
decry the other options in software projects, and turn them all into
religious wars. I guess it's because to a certain extent each of
the projects that people use represent how they think about problems
and thus I can see why they get so protective of there mindshare.
But it's very refreshing to see someone acknowledge each side,
particularly when one of the projects is there own. Keep it up, and
hopefully more will follow in your path
Thanks. I think that the point that you bring up, that the projects that
people use represent how they think about problems, is why I try to bring up
some of the alternatives whenever someone posts something where I could just
say, "Use Iowa!"
Iowa and Rails and CGIkit and Kwartz and Narf-lib and SWS are all different
approachs to the same basic challenge. Some share more overlap in intention
or implementation than others. Some have better docs than others or more
active support, but each of the approaches is valid and fits someone's way
of thinking well. So it's nice to keep the names circulating as that keeps
people looking at different things and thinking about these issues, and we
can all benefit from some cross polination and maybe, like was mentioned in
the Webshare thread, even some actual working together (gasp!). I have no
shame in admiting that I have gotten inspiration for some things that are in
Iowa from DHH's work on Rails as well as from other packages out there, and
although I'd certainly be happy to gain attention and hopefully business by
having no competition out there, competition helps fuel support and
innovation, and that is a good thing in the end.
One of my projects that I just haven't been able to put aside enough time
for, yet, is to put together some reference pages a bit like the templating
frameworks wiki page at rubygarden, but focusing on my impression of the
packages that are in current active use or development, and giving some very
brief examples followed by links to more information. I want to do this
because I think that if there are some more people who play with Iowa, I can
get some more users, but also because even if *I* don't get a new user,
someone who is looking for "the" framework to use that will let them do
their next project in Ruby instead of in PHP or Perl might find another Ruby
framework that fits their idea of perfect. And if I can schedule a little
time once the pages are created to maintain them once in a while, they could
be a fantastic one stop shopping center for people looking for the current
state of the world when it comes to Ruby and web development or Ruby and ORM
packages.
Ah, my kingdom for an unpaid intern!
Kirk Haines