I was primarily looking for a web framework that, out of the box, supported a healthy variety of template/ORM options, offered flexible routing and good layout/view support.

My search took me through the green pastures of Merb, into Sinatra‘s glitzy jazz hall and finally into the land of Ramaze.

Merb’s Green Pastures

I had heard so many good things about Merb that starting with it seemed like a no brainer. The rewrite of xambr.com using Merb was mostly an enjoyable experience – Merb was able to do everything I was doing with Rails out of the box.

There were annoying holes in the documentation but nothing that couldn’t be filled in through a bit of spelunking in the code base – which was pretty clean and easy to understand (at least the parts I looked at were).

Of course, a couple days after finishing the rewrite of xambr.com I read that Merb was to be merged into Rails v3. At first I was a little dismayed but I’ve come to the opinion that the merge is a good thing – Rails will definitely benefit from it and I think Merb’s spot will be taken by the very capable, if under-appreciated, Ramaze.

I ran xambr.com on Merb for about 3 months during which time I dabbled in Sinatra (previously blogged about here). These first experiences with Sinatra were very positive and I liked the fact that it was lighter than Merb – so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Getting Classy with Sinatra [Redux]

While the rewrite of xambr.com in Merb had taken about 10 hours the rewrite in Sinatra took 1/2 that time… or at least 90% of it did.

I got hung up when trying to figure out how to have multiple view sections within a single layout (like Merb’s throw/catch system). Several hours of searching and tinkering didn’t turn anything up other than a tidbit on Github using Haml – which I was not able to get working with Erubis (and I didn’t want to switch to Haml).

Its very likely that with a bit more poking around, maybe hitting up the mailing list or IRC, a solution could have been found but I didn’t want to spend any more time with it – as mentioned above I was looking for a web framework that did all of this out of the box.

So I was a little disappointed, but I still think Sinatra is a great little web framework – just not for online presences (or at least not xambr.com).

Ramaze FTW

I stumbled upon Ramaze several months before starting this little adventure but never gave it the look it deserved. Revisiting it was the best thing I’ve done all year (code wise anyway). How can one possibly argue with “Any ruby, any adapter, any ORM and any template engine” – contortionists everywhere are jealous of Ramaze’s flexibility.

Rewriting xambr.com in Ramaze took about the same time as it did in Merb – roughly 10 hours. I started off using Erubis but ultimately ended up using Nagoro – mainly because I liked its “Page Elements” which are like partials only better. Nagoro is pretty close to Erubis but I’d say its a little more natural if you’re coming at them both with a fresh slate (due to its substitution syntax).

Ramaze has a great community too – a question I posed on the Ramaze IRC channel about some odd Nagoro behavior got an immediate, friendly response from Ramaze’s creator, Michael Fellinger. Now, I’m not a frequenter of IRC channels in general so I wouldn’t know if getting friendly answers from a technology’s creator is the norm but to me it was a much appreciated surprise (thanks Michael!).

The documentation for Ramaze isn’t quite complete but its pretty close – more so than for Merb in my opinion. That said it does seem to be less the subject of blog posts than Merb (although I think that will all change in the coming months). Its got a book (albeit an incomplete one), a ton of well written examples of ranging in size from hello world to a social networking site and a great set of blog posts by Pistos.

All my gushing aside, I did run into a bit of trouble finding a good end-to-end deployment solution. This wasn’t a bad thing though – it forced me to get to know Rack a little better and look into process monitoring solutions. In the coming days (ok maybe weeks…) I’ll be posting my solution (which involves a couple of mongrels under god‘s watchful eye) – its not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination but I did run into a couple of snags…

In Short…

To sum it all up for those of you who’d rather read the back of the envelope (thats me!) here is how I’d characterize each of these Ruby web frameworks:

• Merb
  • Skip it and check out Ramaze instead
    • Merb will likely give you a leg up on Rails 3 but Ramaze will serve you better in the “alternative to Rails” context.
• Sinatra
  • Great place to start if you’re new to web development
    • The README page is close to a one stop shop for everything you need to get up and singing
  • The handy multi-tool you need to get small jobs done quickly
    • eg. Rack middleware, tiny websites, web services, etc
• Ramaze
  • The fine wine of Ruby web frameworks
    • It requires a bit more work but its very rewarding
  • Fluff-less

Sinatra Features

The Sinatra README is a great resource for getting a run down of its features and I’m not going to regurgitate it here. However, I’d like to whet your appetite with a few of the features that caught my eye when I first scoped it out.

Rides on Rack

Sinatra rides on Rack and thus supports a wide variety of handlers such as: Thin, Mongrel, Phusion Passenger, etc (a full list is available on the Rack website). It can also be used to develop Rack middleware. More information about this is available on the README. If you’re interested in Rack middleware in general, Jon Crosby gave a great intro at the Moutain West Ruby Conf 2009.

Flexible Routing

The routing in Sinatra is powerful, supporting RESTful actions, named parameters, regular expressions, splats and user agents. See the Gist bellow for an example. The README page describes these options in more detail.

View/Template Support

There are a host of template options available when using Sinatra. Currently it supports HAML, ERB, Builder and SASS and automatic layout templates (provided you give it a “layout” template to work with). Again, checkout the README page for more details.

My Impressions

What struck me while I was working with Sinatra was how light it was and how out of the way it stayed. It was only present when I needed it to do something — outside of that, it let me build what I wanted, how I wanted. If Rails is the web developer’s assembly line then Sinatra is their essential toolkit — one drives you and the other is driven by you.

While having a pre-baked MVC web framework such as Rails and Merb is great, it does lock you in to one way of thinking about web development. With Sinatra you have the freedom to dabble and experiment — and I don’t think that can ever be a bad thing.

Resources

Here are some resources that I found to be useful in my first adventure with Sinatra.

• README
• API
• Official Documentation Page
• Sinatra on Apache + Phusion Passenger

On Windows I was using E – but that does not run on Linux and I had a couple of gripes with it (slow loading of large files and overaggressive code completion). I gave Vim/gVim a shot but I didn’t enjoy text-editing in a console and gVim is ugly (yes, I do believe attractiveness is important). I was suspicious of the IDE possibilities out there but I did give a number of them (RadRails, RDE, Eclipse, etc) a quick shot. Suffice to say they all suffered from one or more of the following: being too bloated, waving too many wands and possessing play buttons (I feel a rant coming on… stifle!).

Enter jEdit. It is a very functional, customizable, extensible, java based editor and it looks pretty good to boot. So a couple weeks ago I set it up on both my Windows and Linux installs and so far so good – it has what I want and does not suffer from the gripes I had with E. One of my favourite features so far (keep in mind its only been a couple weeks) is it’s “Hyper Search” which is a bit like a built in ack.

Currently, I’m using the following plugins (geared towards ruby/web development):

• Editor Scheme (for pre-fabricated syntax highlighting schemes)
• RubyPlugin
• Console
• Templates

One thing I did have to do in order to get Ruby ERB files to be highlighted properly was to update jEdit’s “modes” catalog file. On my Windows install this was located in C:\Program Files\jEdit\Modes and on Linux it was located in /usr/share/jEdit/modes. My file already contained a reference to an ‘rhtml’ mode so I just updated it – here is the whole mode block:

  <MODE NAME="erb"		FILE="erb.xml"
				FILE_NAME_GLOB="*.{.html.erb,rhtml}" />

If you use that you’ll also need to rename the file rhtml.xml to erb.xml (it will be in the same directory as the catalog file).

As I said I’ve only been using jEdit for a couple of weeks but thus far I do not have anything negative to report. If that changes I’ll update this post. In the meantime, if anyone has any comments about jEdit or other options I might have overlooked please let me (and us) know.