Oh, I hope not.
I loved Java.
Java it its YOUTH, when you could buy two books, the tutorial and the reference, and that was all you needed. Before Swing, before Beans, before it exploded into the publishers wet dream it is now.
If you want to use Java on the web, you need to go on 3 two week courses, buy a rainforest worth of books and have a brain the size of a planet to encompass it all. To me, Java has gotten old, and fat and slow.
Thats why I love Rails, it started with 2 books, the Ruby reference and Pickaxe. Ahh, young, svelt, petite.
Rails is coming up for her second birthday, and I see signs, signs that my new darling is piling on the pounds.
DHH is fighting this.
Apparently, the move to push formerly core functionality out into plugins (acts_as_* among them) is to reduce loading times.
And I see plugins themselves as an attempt to make a demarcation line….
This is core, THAT (over there in the vendor directory) is NOT.
I hope it works, I really do, I hope it does not foster confusion, and I hope that the move of formerly core stuff into vendor does not increase the confusions.
One possible problem I see is that with acts_as_* in vendor, its now permissible to think of it as interchangeable, now we can have many different implementations of these core features, and this way lays madness.
I want rails to continue to be her trim, lightweight self, I don’t want to have to devote a whole bookshelf to rails and associated technologies…