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Roll your own Ruby Web Framework in Half an Hour

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63 pointssvs14 comments

It seems gauche to insult Rails for being bloated, while bragging that you can write your own framework in 43 lines of code -- while using ActionDispatch::Routing::RouteSet, a fairly complicated, very powerful, part of Rails which takes way more than 43 lines to express.

(735 lines, not counting any of it's own dependencies inside Rails. https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionpack/lib/ac...)

Sure, you wrote your own framework in 30 minutes -- by using a part of Rails which many many developer-hours have gone into, over many calendar years. (https://github.com/rails/rails/commits/master/actionpack/lib... history stops at rails3 four years ago, when they moved the router from one project to another... the actual history goes back further)

Rails may arguably be bloated, but as of Rails3 it's also amazingly modular and decoupled, allowing you to use just the parts of it you want. And OP thought the Router was awesome enough to want to reuse it. At least give it the credit it deserves, for that, when you're using Rails to write a framework you say shows how Rails is awful!

The issue is that by the time you bring in an ORM/database migrations, form builder, link builders, asset pipeline, admin panel, etc you have basically hobbled together your own ghetto version of Rails without the vast resources/support that Rails has. One of the benefits of Rails is that it has all of those features mostly baked in - at the cost of some bloat.

But my project doesn't need all that, you might say. Well, that's fine, then use something like Sinatra. But I wouldn't build a non-toy web application without the above things.

It is somewhat ironic you chose the word ghetto when discussing Rails, as it reminds of Zed's previous article.

I think it is a good thing for new and maybe even experienced Ruby developers to build their own, to see a way beyond all the meta magic and five minute blogs, and that you really don't need that much plumbing to get things moving and understandable.

At least it didn't say roll Rails in five minutes - it would take much longer than that to bake in all the security holes and to stick YAML parsers all over the shop.

IIRC, Zed was referring to the community, and not the software.

Fortunately most of the libraries available in the community are not rails dependent anymore and you can make a custom setup with exactly the things you need rather easily.

Rails specific and exclusive features are mostly conventions and the flow from routes to controller and views, which for me is very disagreeable.

As a Drupal developer, I find it cute how you Ruby guys consider Rails to be massive and monolithic. You know nothing of massive and monolithic :)

I've been working with Rails for five years, and a year ago I had an aborted project with a friend on Drupal on which I spent about 6 weeks. It was pretty terrible.

Aborted project on Drupal sums up my latest experience with it too. I have completed a couple over the years though, but after building a few Rails apps, never again will I use Drupal.

I complain a lot about documentation in Ruby and Rails, but wow, Drupal eats those deficiencies for lunch. It was where I concluded that, sometimes, know-how is held closely as a profit center. It's not even a learning curve thing where the ladder to expertise is long, but that several rungs are entirely missing, if not kicked through by previous climbers.

Hehe, you are so right. I remember at some point considering Drupal for a project because I thought Django was doing "too much" on certain things and "too little" where I needed it the most.

Fast forward a month and two books later: I rewrote the whole thing in Django in half the time with 10% of the hacks. Drupal is great for what it does, just don't try to make it do anything it doesn't or customize it too much.

haha. Yeah, these guys have never seen a java spring app.

For what it's worth, I was dissatisfied with most Ruby frameworks (aka. Rails & Sinatra), so when it came time to build up a massive project on a Ruby backend, I rolled my own minimal (<1kloc) Ruby framework.

https://github.com/kballenegger/kenji

I, too, find Rails to be a bloated mess. Here's what I wanted out of my ideal framework:

- The "framework" has one single task: providing a DSL for routing requests, and dealing with the HTTP nitty-gritty.

- The default would be build for JSON APIs. The return value of routes gets serialized to JSON.

- Everything is explicit. No magic.

- You can organize you code in simple, maintainable units (files), grouped by functionality. (This is achieved through a tree routing structure, where controllers can pass / forward certain routes to other controllers.

- Code can be namespaced, can be tested easily, can be scripted easily. Functionality does not depend on naming conventions.

^^^ This

;-)

If you are curious about a roll-your-own article similar to this, but for Python: http://docs.webob.org/en/latest/do-it-yourself.html

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