Plays well with others: Building Mountable Apps

Rails 3.1 introduced Mountable Apps and Engine, a great way for developers to build and reuse functionality between applications. Engines can be as simple as adding a model, or a complex as an entire content management system. Now using the Asset Pipeline, even javascript and css files can be packaged and shared, making projects cleaner and more maintainable than ever before.

This talk will cover how developers can create their own engines, to add new controllers/models/views, rake tasks and/or generators. It will cover how engines can interact with Rails having their own initializers and middleware. Finally, based on our experiences converting BrowserCMS and its entire module ecosystem to work as mountable engines, this talk will cover how to make engines that are designed to work together, extend each other engine’s behavior and make it easy for developers to upgrade when you release new versions.