Meta Bates

Why did I fall in love with Rack and Thin? That’s easy. I love Thin because it lives up to it’s name. It’s thin. It’s incredibly fast, has great clustering support built in, and is the next generation of Ruby web servers. It kicks Mongrel’s ass and it takes names. I’m sure if you asked Zed Shaw he would have no problem with Thin replacing Mongrel.

Rack I love because of it’s simplicity, and it’s uniformity. It’s setting out to create a standard for which any Ruby web application can very easily be plugged into a web server. By abstracting that layer out it makes it easier for developers to focus on writing great apps, and not having to worry about how to deploy them.

Once I started to play around with Rack it didn’t take me more then a few minutes to have a very simple site up and running.

Within a few days I had the basics of a Rails like framework rocking, and within two weeks I had the core of Mack coded, and that’s where I am today.

Mack is a very fast, stable, and extensible framework. It’s designed to be lean and mean and not be all things to all people. It’s meant to get you started on the right path, but to let you have your own opinions. It’s designed to help you build portal applications simply and efficiently, and deploy with just as much ease.

Mack is ORM agnostic, although it does have some special hooks for ActiveRecord and DataMapper. It does not force you to use a certain type of system for doing web services, although it does promote a RESTful lifestyle. Configuration and setup is system, but there’s no reason for you to use it as is out of the box.

Mack encourages experimentation, and  it hopes that you customize it make it your own.

Go and scour through the API and then download the gem and start building your next generation application the way YOU want to, not the way someone else tells you you have to.