I''m a total newbie still plowing though people''s code and figuring things out in general. One of the things I''ve been looking at are plugins and engines. Although I''m a newbie, I reached the conclusion that either approach really leaves much to be desired (also, since I need to learn about the underlying code instead of borrowing). I totally agree with DHH that separation of "business logic" from the framework is crucial and necessary to keep Rails from becoming "another bloated framework (TM)", yet at the same time web applications will likely share a lot of business logic to start with. One idea, I''d like to ask you all about involves the extension of Rails (in other words, Rails would become a dependent library much like ActiveRecord is to Rails) itself with a separate "ruby gem" that will for this example be called "framework generator" or "framegen" for short. The FG could be extended with other generators such as: --login generator --permissions --forums --blogs and whatever else, but all of these components will be developed outside FG itself. What this will do is extend rails so that you can build a skeleton rails application with all of the above components integrated by throwing it multiple parameters. For example at the command line, you can type: framegen rails_app_directory login blog forum permissions That way you wont have to worry about porting various third-party components, cluttering the Rails framework, or get a confusing directory structure within your application but the skeleton components will be integrated from the start. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wrath.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/attachments/20060110/a03bcd63/attachment.html