Don't worry, use Happy. The new Ruby web framework. | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry, use Happy. The new Ruby web framework.

moeffju.net

19 pointsmoeffju11 comments

How does this compare with the existing, tested and awesome framework Ramaze? Have you tried it? More info: http://ramaze.net/

I haven't tried Ramaze, but from a cursory look I find the whole `map ...` thing harder to follow than Happy's route method. It also looks like Ramaze makes you write out more things explicitly, like:

    Ramaze.start(:root => Ramaze.options.roots, :started => true)

    Ramaze.options.roots = [__DIR__]
    require __DIR__('controller/tutorial')

Also, the URL to method mapping is done with yet another separate method 'trait'? Ramaze doesn't really jive with me right now. I'll have a closer look at it over the weekend.

How does it compare to Padrino? Which also fills the gap between sinatra and rails.

Padrino is nice, too. It's definitely more mature than Happy, and a little more complex I guess. Now I'm thinking about trying to port the `def route` style dispatch to Padrino, because I still feel that it's superior to the `method url, options do` pattern. That might just be the Happy excitement talking, however.

Why do you feel it's superior? It feels distinctly clunkier to me. I'm not opposed to new things, but powerful DSLs are one of Ruby's best perks.

Because then you have to handle things like route precedence, method routing, "resource" mapping, etc. The `def route` way is very linear, you have one point of entry and that's it, the code just flows from there. With a bunch of `match /xyz` statements, or even a routing layer, the connection is less direct and potentially more prone to bugs.

I'm interested in this but your introduction is a little lacking. "Hello, World" isn't really enough to get a feel for a framework, how about "Hello, To-Do App" or "Hello, Blog"?

Regardless, congrats on your release!

Hi, author of Happy here. A Todo or Blog app as a basic example is a great idea! I'm planning on adding more example apps to the source distribution and will make sure they'll be part of that.

I'm also the author of Schnitzelpress, a Ruby-based blog engine built with Sinatra (and optimized for hosting on Heroku and similar cloud providers), and I will be porting it from Sinatra to Happy some time soon.

The full example app from the tutorial is linked from the blog article, but it was too much code to show inline. Also, the hamburg.io app gives a pretty good overview of what Happy can do. It's also linked from the blog post, or directly: https://github.com/hmans/hamburg-io

First pet project created in it (https://github.com/prograils/css2ap), framework looks really promising for tiny webapps. What I really like is this simple and straightforward flow control.

Thanks for giving it a go, and I'm really glad that you like it!

However, whenever someone says that Happy is a nice framework "for tiny webapps", I like to chime in and add that the goal for Happy is to be as simple (and thus fit for tiny apps) as Sinatra, but also a great fit for large applications as it allows for a kind of modular development style that may feel a whole lot more natural to some people than what Rails is doing (and Padrino is sadly trying to mimick): controllers actually describing behavior - no matter how simple or complex - and not URLs or individual resources.

I'm very much looking forward to finding out how much this resonates with other Rubyists. Upwards and onwards :)

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