The Forgotten Ruby Web Frameworks

With the success of Ruby on Rails, is there a place left for other Web frameworks written in Ruby? Everyone knows Rails, some might even have heard of Merb and Camping, but has anyone heard of Nitro, Ramaze, Sinatra, IOWA or Cerise? InfoQ quickly tours these frameworks and how they are appreciated (or ignored) by the blogosphere.

We previously talked about Merb which is maybe the most accomplished Rails alternative. It is a fairly active project and is used in several production environments. It is the Ruby Web framework which has the most similarities with Rails.

Camping defines itself as a web framework which consistently stays at less than 4kb of code. The project is 22 months old, and maintained by whytheluckystiff. A whole web application can be defined in a single file while still following the MVC pattern (making it easier to migrate to Rails later). Camping uses ActiveRecord as the ORM; the templating system used is Markaby. Whytheluckystiff keeps enhancing Camping on a regular basis.

Nitro is a 3 years old "Web 2.0" framework.  After a period of inactivity, George K. Moschovitis seems to be active again. Nitro apps are written in Ruby for server side and Javascript for client side. Urubatan made a recent review of it. Contrary to Rails which favors coding by convention, Nitro is more flexible. Nitro also makes it possible to write Model-View-Controller based apps and non-MVC php-style apps as well.  Nitro uses xhtml files with custom Ruby tags as template system.  Nitro also uses its own persistence layer called Og (ObjectGraph). Og allows the serialization of arbitrary Ruby objects. Once marked as Object (or Array or Hash) in the attr_accessor, the engine will serialize a YAML dump of the object. Arbitrary object graphs are supported too. Og provides automagic database evolution: when a Ruby class is changed, Og will automatically detect it and change and alter the database accordingly. Some of you might miss all the features of ActiveRecord Migration.

Ramaze is a 6 month old light Ruby Web Framework. It was built using well-known Ruby principles:

• KISS (Keep It Super Simple)
• POLS (Principle Of Least Surprise)
• Modular design
• Minimal dependencies
• Documentation
• Open development
• BDD Development / Examples

Ramaze is an MVC web framework which uses its own templating system called Ezamar. But you can also plug Markaby, HAML, Liquid or ERB over it. Ramaze doesn't come with a default ORM (Object-Relational Mapper), you can use the one of your choice: ActiveRecord, Og... It supports advanced usages such as Cache, and webapps can be served through Mongrel or Evented Mongrel. You'll find more details about it on the Ramaze wiki.

Sinatra is a one month old DSL web development framework. Ron Evans made a short review of it. The major difference with Rails is that it is not a Model-View-Controller based framework. Sinatra is made of a minimal DSL-syntax, its small base core does not contain such module as ActiveRecord. Sinatra has dynamic route definition through the use of get/post action definitions. As Ron states, Sinatra is not made for robust web applications, but rather small prototype where mixing business logic and presentation layer is not a problem.

So what would it be good for? API implmentations, quick minimal applications, and web development that does not want or need things that are included in Rails, like ActiveRecord. Control panel mini-applications, or perhaps widgets.

Of the other frameworks, IOWA has not been active for 3 years and Cerise has not been active for 1 year so we won't go into those.

Apart from Nitro which, like Rails, has its own complete core, the other web frameworks try to be as small as possible, making the user free to plug in their favorite ORM, Templating System, etc. Even if some of those frameworks might suffer from a lack of documentation or even it they do not have as many features, popularity, or users Rails, they might still be worth having a look at.