Recently I have been playing with 2 alternative frameworks. Ramze and Mack. This isn’t going to be any sort of review on the either. Just a short post to share my feelings.
Ramaze is a great framework, because it gets back to basics and just gives you enough of what you need in order to get going. And at first when I was exploring other frameworks I was using Ramaze. But while Ramaze is a great framework I found myself writing a lot of code just to get it to do what thing like Rails, Merb & Mack already did.
So I have switched from using Ramaze to using Mack. Which is supposed to be a best of breed from all the frameworks. I think I am happier using Mack because, while Ramaze is great, I don’t want to have to redo things that have already been done. I mean that is the whole point of a framework, to reduce the repetition and tedium of coding, and to speed up time to deployment. And I just found myself constantly fighting with Ramaze to get those things done. So it doesn’t really suit me, but I would definitely say that if you haven’t used it you should give it a try. It might just be what you are looking for.
For now I will continue with Mack. Let see how long I will stick with it. If you have read my other posts you’ll know that I don’t stick with frameworks or editors for long as I am always looking for something better. But maybe with Mack I might have found a good Medium.
P.s. I am still using jEdit as my evaluation of all other editors (even gEdit with all its recent plugins) show that none come close to jEdits ease of use and extensibility. Although I have high hopes for Redcar being developed by Daniel Lucraft. I have recently downloaded and built it from the git repo and it is looking very good indeed, and on my Asus 1000h it is not too much slower than jEdit. And best of all it is in Ruby, meaning that if I wanted I could hack on it without feeling I was using a language that depressed me (like java). But I will have to wait and see on that. But you can check out Redcar ide from the link on in the links menu. It is also on github, and also there is a lighthouse account.
Well this was just supposed to be a really short post, but I guess I rambled on a bit more than I expected.
