[Rails] Re: [ANN] MenuEngine

[James Adam]

On 7/28/06, Michael Schuerig <michael at schuerig.de> wrote:
> Suit yourself. Have a look at the distribution of the average plugin
> compared to the average engine. A plugin with tests can consist of
> about five files. An engine apparently comes with a bit more baggage.
> If you only want to plunk some functionality into your app, you've got
> no reason to care about this. But if you want to have a quick look at
> the code and to see how things work, less *unnecessary* clutter is
> better.

Using the plugin/engine that this thread was originally about as an
example, the developer could happily drop half of the 'clutter':

* db/  is empty
* test/ is unused (though it really ought to include tests, hint hint! :)
* tasks/ is empty
* lib/menu_engine/ is empty
* app/controllers/ is empty
* app/views/ is empty

... Max might even choose to drop the entire app folder - if he
doesn't care about the code mixing stuff, the helper and model could
happily sit in lib. This would leave... 6 files (including the README)
in two directories - lib, and public. Pretty clean.

Not everything that uses the engines plugin need be huge, heavyweight,
bulky, or bloated. Just because an 'engine' can carry more baggage,
doesn't mean it has to.

-- 
* J *
  ~