Engines still the best option for vertical slice code reuse?

Rails Engines Development
1

Hi,

It seems like quite a while ago that I used engines or even Rails as
I’ve been on a long JavaScript detour. Now I have time to get back to
my long term project of building online stores and would like to catch
up to the state-of-the-art in code reusability in the Rails world and
productization.

Engines are really the only way I know that I could build a generic
store application and then have a layer on top that will customize
this application for a particular retailer. Then the generic
application layer can easily be updated. Are there any other code
reuse options out there worth looking at?

DHH doesn’t care for the idea of high level components but what do you
think he would do if he had to write and maintain 20 online stores for
small business owners? I would really like to read his answer to that
question.

Thanks,
Peter

2

Well said. I was baffled the first time I read a negative comment
about engines, especially from the Rails team. Without Engines, I
might have given up on Rails for the handful of sites I had to put on
nearly identical codebases.

And yes, as far as I know, Engines is still the only solution for
achieving this. But it is a fine one.

Justin
blaix.com