Frequently Asked Questions

Engines vs Generators

Engines could be considered in many ways the natural successor to Rails’ generators:

• Both are mechanisms for packaging up disparate groups of files which must be placed throughout your whole application directory structure
• Both provide controllers, models, libraries and views, along with schema information, tests and helpers to be used throughout your application’s code.

Oh God, What Have We Done?

This was something of a response to misunderstandings about what Engines are. For more background you might want to read DHH’s first post about engines and this.