Alchemy: A Ruby Example

So the Ruby community loves Rails 4. Scala has Play 2. PHP has Symfony 2 (or maybe Laravel 4, PHP is quite fragmented). These web frameworks aim to make our lives, as developers, simpler.

Here are a few benefits that some frameworks provide:

• Directory structure
• HTTP routing
• Dependency injection
• Programming patterns
• Testing
• Consistent way of solving web application problems

All useful things. They make these decisions for you so you don't have to. They also remove or reduce the boiler plate for doing such things.

We have all worked on legacy, barnacled applications. We all know how bad sans-framework can be. We developed frameworks to remove the pain of repetition and disorganisation. I would like to suggest that we can avoid repetition and disorganisation without frameworks. We simply need a few solid rules we can apply to web applications and across languages. Essentially something like MVC without the framework and more general advice too.

About this example

This repository is a ruby web application that doesn't use a framework. It's controllers are fully tested and every other component testable.

Installing

From the command line you can install the dependencies to run this project with bundler:

bundle

Running dev server

To run the reloadable dev server run:

shotgun

Running the tests

Again, just a simple command:

rspec

Technologies in use

So the only component used in the test suite independent of the code written here by me is rspec itself. Running rspec is quick because the code base is small. You'd also find it fast in a larger environment too. This is because using dependency injection there are no costly frameworks and libraries being loaded into memory.

When running the dev web server, the application is served via sinatra. Sinatra in this case is simply used as a routing layer. Via the App::Interaction::Application::Sinatra object a request hash is created and passed into the controllers. This is similar to the way hashes are passed directly into the controllers in the test suite.

To render the web pages when running the dev web server we use mustache.

In all I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if not confused. It is my aim to reduce this confusion over time.

Author

Luke Morton