Back in February I decided to take Ruby on Rails for a spin. I was curious to see what people were talking about, and why David was so keen to try it out.
I found there was much to like about Rails, particularly the maxims of “Write Less Code”, “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, and “Convention Over Configuration”. Even though I believe Cocoon is a Swiss Army Chainsaw capable of tackling a wide range of projects, I could certainly see why Rails is considered advantageous in some situations.
Of course, being big on words and short on comprehension, I couldn’t see why Cocoon doesn’t emulate some of the ease-of-use that Rails embodies. I think as developers we’ve become a little too willing to spend hours in arcane XML configuration files, tweaking our myriad-dependency toolkits and ignoring what Larry Wall considered the most important virtues of a good programmer: laziness, impatience and hubris.
This evening I finally started work on an idea I’d been discussing with David and Jeremy for several months: Racoon. All the fun of Rails, on Cocoon. I’m too lazy to keep writing tons of xconf patches, I’m too impatient to fiddle around with object-relational mapping tools, and as for hubris: well, there’s no way I’m the best coder around, but I like to think I’m more lazy and impatient than anyone else I know 
Some notes: no, I have no idea yet if I can make this work to any sane and reasonable degree. Think of it as a grand experiment or as the product of evenings spent with some good red wine. Secondly, there’s some obvious overlap with the Lepido project, but I think I’m aiming for a different level of user: the kind of person that’s happier in TextMate than Eclipse. Finally, I’m playing around with this outside of either of the obvious communities at first, because I want to get a greater understanding of the problems and solutions. This is me experimenting.
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I don’t think Racoon overlaps with Lepido. As I understand it, if Racoon follows the Rails example, it will be more about generating application skeletons and providing an easier link between the database and the view (a la ActiveRecord). This can perfectly fit with Lepido where it will be a set of actions and wizards that run the code generators behind the scenes.
BTW, I started thinking of an ActiveRecord-like thing for Cocoon, and IMO the power of JavaScript is really under-used in Cocoon. Also, with a bit of ScriptableObject trickery, Rhino could support catching undeclared properties and methods just like Ruby does.