On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 02:05:45PM -0700, Brandon J. Van Every wrote: > I'm afraid my own Chicken projects are getting the backburner right > now. Technical stuff is just too much work when I'm spending a lot of > time signature gathering. The season ends in early July and if I > don't travel to another state to do more work, then I'll have more > time for Chicken. This kind of problem of critical mass, and > application interest, is why Ruby has Rails and Chicken doesn't.
If I recall correctly, Rails was initially done by one person/small team for a website. Later the Rails stuff got separated from the project. In essence, Rails isn't that much: it's a handy hack for building class layouts from a database table description (ActiveRecord), some addon libraries for the Time class and a framework that aids in implementing the model/view/controller (data manipulation/presentation/logic) separation. It also includes some stuff to do Ajax, but we already have that in the Ajax egg. And some session support, but we can do that easily, and even _better_ with continuations. See (http://radio.weblogs.com/0102385/2004/04/03.html#a568) for some tasty stuff. This could ideally be integrated in Spiffy. I think the hardest thing will be the ActiveRecord-like support since Scheme isn't especially object-oriented. The question is whether that is really required. The most important aspect about Rails is that it has decent defaults. You can just build a database and run Rake to set up a Rails environment and you have a bare-bones interface to the database out of the box. To do things, you need the very minimum of custom code. This is the essence of what makes Rails so popular. I'm not sure if this can be done as easily in a non-object-oriented environment. Ruby makes it easy to automatically build objects from information because it allows you to add members to existing classes. I think with the Prometheus egg we could do something like this. As you see, a lot of stuff is already there. It's just crying for someone to put it all together. I've been thinking about doing something like this myself since I am involved in web programming for a company where we are using PHP (yuck!) and Ruby. I'd *love* to have something like Rails in Chicken. The reason I haven't done any work on it is, of course, I'm currently too busy with some other things that just need to get done before I can do anything fun like hacking Chicken :( If anyone is interested: having a decent userfriendly Scheme CMS would be *very* useful too :) Regards, Peter -- http://www.student.ru.nl/peter.bex -- "The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music." -- Donald Knuth
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