[Rails-core] ActionWebService targeted for unbundling by 1.1

[Justin Forder]

David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:

> The creator of ActionWebService, Leon Breedt, seems to be on a
> long-term vacation from Rails work 

Is he alive? Does anyone know if he's OK?

> and no one else in the core group
> is working with this framework. So its not a good fit to be in core
> when none of core is deeply familiar with it. 

I agree that for something to be in core it must be maintainable by 
known maintainers. I assume Leon fell into that category, without (I 
guess) being in the core team.

 > On top of that, it's not
> one of those things that "most people need most of the time", so
> that's another strike.

Do you know the figures here? Without daring to tread on the ground of 
"is Rails enterprise-ready?" I would point out that being able to offer 
functionality either through a Web UI or via a web service is a big 
enterprise "tick in the box".

> With those charges, we want to unbundle AWS from the core distribution
> of Rails. That sounds dramatic, but it's really just a 1 line change
> in the Rakefile of railties:
> 
>   -      s.add_dependency('actionwebservice', '= 1.0.0' + PKG_BUILD)
> 
> ...and if you actually used AWS, it would be easy as pie to keep
> installing it with:
> 
>   gem install actionwebservice
> 
> So this is a very likely thing to happen for 1.1. If you have any
> concerns as to why it shouldn't go down like that, please voice your
> opinion. If you want to take the lead on maintaining AWS, please speak
> up too (that won't stop our intentions to unbundle, though).

Personally, I believe that anything up to Rails 2.0 should respect the 
commitment to "not break the Book (AWDR)". At the very least, there 
should be a succession of versions that warn the user before something 
actually breaks.

Perhaps you should go through the book and publish the "truck number"[1] 
of each feature.

regards

   Justin

[1] Truck Number - the number of people who would need to be run over by 
a truck to render a given feature unviable.