Question

All,

I am developing a rails app (biz-tools) that will made of several modules, e.g. authentication, business-mgmt, etc… I need some guidance/suggestions on how to create these modules as gems, plugins or engines? Some of the requirements are:

1. Each deployment of a biz-tools for a client is specific. Beside the authentication module ( required), other modules are optional (depending on client needs).

2. Some modules might depends on other modules, e.g. , “business-mgmt” module will depend on “authentication” module

Thanks for any insight.

Answer 1

Two Ideas

1. Dependening on the size of the application, you might want to build
   the whole full scale app, and then disable functionality according
   to permissions applied to an install intance.

2. Take a look at Spree. It’s a E-Commerce solution with multiple extensions that are configured as Rails engines.