From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2007-04-26T03:16:52+09:00
Subject: DHH vs. WHY style

Like to know others general opinions on having a comprehensive library
vs. independent libraries.

In my quest to make Facets' functionality available in some smaller
parts, I am left with hard choice. I think of it as the DHH vs. WHY
style question, b/c these two well known developers most clearly
reflect the approaches in their work. For DHH (ie. Rails) we have a
number of libs with closely labeled packages: ActionPack,
ActionMailer, ActiveSupport, ActiveRecord, etc. While _why's libs all
have highly independent packaging with clever names: Markaby, Hpricot,
Syck, etc. Now, I realize that different circumstances have certainly
led to this, eg. Rails is meant as a single comprehensive web-
framework, while Why's packages are more unique and reflect his
exceptional creatively, but either could have taken the other approach
if they so wished. And in my case (and surely some other large
projects as well), the distinction is not as straight forward.

So my question is, which is preferable? What criteria should one base
this decision on?

To clarify here is my specific scenario. I've narrowed it down, more-
or-less, to these Whyish vs. DHHish possibilities:

  Aces        Facets/CORE
  Jacks       Facets/BASE
  Tapestry    Facets/AOP
  Comrade     Facets/CLI
  Fileside    Facets/FS
  Annote      Facets/ANN

A couple of the names I'm not 100% sure about yet, but you get the
idea. I've been thinking about this a long time and haven't been able
to decide what direction to take for future development. It's most
significant impact, I suppose, is to the require namespaces ('facets/
aop/' vs. 'tapestry/' for example). The only other solid difference I
have found between them is that some libs don't mesh well with the DHH
style so those need to be completely separate anyway (for instance, my
modified redistribution of HTTPAccess2).

Thanks for any insights,
T.