In an entirely premature judgement, I am going to say Action Pack ain’t so good. Firstly, its Apache only, and I can’t be arsed writing yet another Webrick wrapper myself. Secondly, its just retro ASP-style embedded code templates. Parameter handling, as I’ve ranted about nearly endlessly before, should be dealt with a lot better than throwing fields into a hash.
As I stated, being Apache only, I haven’t used Action Pack. So this comment is uninformed by actual experience, only from scanning the source and examples. There was a question posed to the list mere minutes ago: why are people excited about this, compared to the older and (perhaps) wiser CGIKit ? It rehashes the MVC paradigm, and it brings nothing new to the table. Given David’s track record, it may well be nicer to program in, and David created it for a specific purpose (Basecamp), and has successfully applied it to a well-regarded program (Instiki). But it doesn’t open up a new way of doing things. If this rant is starting to sound familiar, its because I’m whistling the same old tune.
This really is nothing against Rails. I wish David the best with it. I just need the new and shiny things obviously standing out. This seems more like a slightly buffed classic ASP lookalike.
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