This is webmachine-mvc, a shiny, glittering disco ball of delicious MVC magic sprinkled over Sean Cribb's excellent webmachine-ruby library.
This project is all fun and games and not for profit. I just needed a break from coding stuff in Ramaze and webmachine looked interesting. However, after playing a few hours with webmachine I started to miss certain things from ramaze, so I started thinking about how to make things work in a more familiar way. Thus, webmachine-mvc was born!
Even though webmachine is awesome, there are a few things that I think would be useful to add for the average web developer:
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Simpler management of resourses
Webmachine usually uses a whole class just for handling a single URL. This gives a lot of flexibility, but in many cases it is pretty overkill as most pages just display some HTML. In webmachine-mvc, many URLs can be managed by a single controller.
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Better living through templating
Webmachine does not help you with templating but does not get in your way if you want to use them either. For me, most URLs display some readable content so I think it is important to make templating more easily available in webmachine. In webmachine-mvc, the templating is provided by tilt, making it easy to use your favorite templating engine.
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Models
Oh, I love them so much! Who ever uses SQL when there are beautiful libraries like sequel and datamapper that makes the hardest quadruple join a breeze? (I know some people prefer performance over simplicity, but not me.)
Webmachine-mvc does not have its own models yet, but when they arrive (if ever) they will probably be based on Sequel::Model. I'm actually quite fond of how Ramaze handles models (by mostly ignoring them) so I have not really decided on how to implement this part yet.
Are you kidding me? This doc probably took longer to write than it took to write the entire code base (so far). This is not production code and will probably crash and burn within seconds. I have started writing some tests and when they start to pass things will probably be somewhat more stable. The only thing that probably works right now is the controller initialization and the templating,
It won't. Like I said in the beginning, this is just a toy. It will eventually be made into a gem, but that might take a few weeks before I get that far.
Since I don't have any grand plans for the project I will probably just hack on it occasionally on my precious spare time. If you feel you want to contribute, you are welcome to send me a pull request. I will probably accept anything as long as it adds something useful.
If you want to use any part of the code in your own project you are very much welcome to do so provided that you follow the licence of the code. All code in the project is licenced under the GNU General Public Licence (version 3 or later). If you don't know about the GNU GPL, you should probably go and read the file COPYING now.
Over and out -- lasso