I’m at the Merb and Rails 3 community forum with Yehuda Katz and Matt Amionetti right now. It’s an event with no agenda; they just opened the floor to questions. I asked them a couple of questions about Merb slices.

First, I asked them what would happen with slices in Rails 3. They explained that slices are going away in future versions of Rails and Merb, but the functionality will still be there. Instead of having slices, applications will simply be “mountable” within other applications.

I then asked if components such as models could be shared between slices. Yehuda said that their goal was to give all applications a namespace by default. He then went on to say that hopefully there will be no need to refer to an application’s namespace from within the application.

This sounds great! With a few contributions from the community, it should be at least as easy to install multiple apps into a site and get them sharing stuff as it currently is in Django.