Hi, I was asking for some action item and I received one - to take a look at Rails Engines and whether it can help us with our umbrella project. So here is my first impression: It is build on simple principle that you can add any application to the subdirectory (vendor/plugins) and it will somehow work. Everything will get propagated to the main application. And you can override anything you want. One of the main problems I encounter was broken documentation link [2] on Rails Engines home page. Example link worked so I tried to put together few example applications gathered from different locations. Other problems I encounter so far: - To get your new engine working you have to restart server. - If you have multiple engines with same view, it's hard to guess which one will win. - As engines gets mixed together results might be unexpected as they will interact with each other (I ended up with page with multiple heads from different engines) Advantages: - Less messy then scaffolding and better maintainable. - Easy to create a modular application where modules can be maintained separately even for total beginners like me. So my finding so far suggests that it's nice way do develop and maintain plugins with some features for main applications, but using it to blindly put together several applications that don't know about each other is not a good idea :-D So if our webs are modular enough (or we will make them so), it might be useful to use this to give them same look and feel and some features. [1] http://rails-engines.org/ [2] http://api.rails-engines.org/ -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o openSUSE Boosters Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz