From: Alan Garrison <alang@...>
Date: 2005-01-07T01:03:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Slightly OT: Re: [BOUNTY] Shopping cart ...

A likely even more offtopic question...  (total Ruby noob and list 
lurker here) I've been hacking PHP for years now (and it's dulling my 
mind, hence my interest in Ruby) and have been coding stuff for the 
Horde project (www.horde.org).  Horde is an open source general web 
application framework in PHP and has drop-in applications for email, 
sieve rule editor, time tracking, a ticket system, a calendar app w/ 
appointments, a wiki, a half-assed shopping cart app, etc...  The Horde 
core app(s) handles user authentication, user administration, ACLs, a 
HTML template engine, etc.  Given my basic understanding of Rails I'm 
thinking that writing drop-in apps may be difficult, but then again I'm 
still wrapping my brain around the MVC concept.  With Horde to add a new 
app, you just make a subdirectory from the base Horde directory, fiddle 
with a few things, and your app is now part of the whole site.

Does a Ruby based Horde-ish architecture all ready exist?  I'd imagine 
that if something like this were developed, writing drop-in apps may be 
a better approach for things like shopping carts as opposed to writing 
ad hoc apps that just handle the basics but have similar needs 
(authentication, session handling, templates, etc).

Just my $0.02 (adjust for inflation)