The History Of Mack, pt. 1
Let me start by answering the question at the top of your head, “why another ruby web application framework?” Great question.
I work for a company that for the time being shall be called Menderchuck. Menderchuck has been using Ruby on Rails since the company started two years ago. I am employee number three at Menderchuck, and was hired directly by the VP of Development. I was hired as the Senior Software Architect. I’m now the Director of Architecture for the company. 
Sorry about the bragging, I just like telling people I’m a director!
Prior to joining the company I had been using Rails for about 6 months, long before v1.0.0 of the now widely used framework. I loved Rails. I still do in fact, well, kind of. More on that later. Rails was the only choice for developing Menderchuck. The VP of Development and myself were huge fans, and having both come from Java backgrounds, we loved the flexibility and fun of Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework.
As I said we’ve spent the past two years developing Menderchuck using Rails, and for the most part things have been OK. I can’t say that they’ve been great, because, well, they haven’t. We’ve had scalability problems, deployment problems, and most importantly problems with the constraints that Rails places on development team.
The idea of an opinionated framework is great, in theory. If you follow and play by their rules things are great. The problem arises if you want to stray from the beaten path. Then you are left out on your own. Left to forge your own path, and as we’ve found at Menderchuck, you end up doing a whole hell of a lot of hacking!
Rails was designed for, and is incredible for building Web 2.0 applications. Menderchuck, although touted by the CEO as a Web 2.0 application, is really more of a complex and large scale web application, in the flavor of Web 1.0 applications. It’s also more of a portal, which can be a very difficult thing to build with the Rails framework.
Now don’t get me wrong, you CAN build a portal using Rails, but it really involves turning the framework on it’s head and kicking it in the neck. That just shouldn’t be the way build things.
Enter Mack. (More to come…)
Tags: mack, menderchuck, rails, ruby, web 2.0
