I myself have strived for the ultimate reuse on several projects and you can achieve it on some very few simple issues, but generally speaking reuse by copy and paste is much more effective than other ways of doing it.

With Ruby on Rails as well I find the core infrastructure is so good that I find myself reusing from Memory and experience much more than I would in say Java.

An example. For data models it is much easier for me to just generate the models and manually build up the relations than copying from an existing project or extrapolating common frameworks for that matter.

A side effect of this as well is that I am not afraid to dump 100% of my code and just redoing it, if I feel there is a good reason to do so.

We still have an OpenACS deployment, but I suspect it will be going away in the next couple of years.

You didn’t talk in your article, however, about the OpenACS datamodel–that was really what drew me to the toolkit originally. Especially the groups/relations/permissioning system. It was so powerful, and we really did use it extensively in our applications.

That is something I will definitely miss, and each time I consider
starting over with something else I keep thinking "gosh, I really
don’t want to rebuild that, they did such a good job…".

Another thing we discovered, though, was that if you went with OpenACS, you really had to do everything with OpenACS. Integration with other systems was hard. This became even more apparent with the drive in the community to move all the logic from the SQL layer into the Tcl layer. When everything was in the SQL layer, you could do just about anything you wanted with any language as long as you could talk to the database. In the Tcl layer, you had to write another layer for integration.

Maybe it’s hard with anything, and I really tried to avoid the "if all
you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" trap.

Aurelius Prochazka now uses Rails. ‘Nuff said…