Camping, a Microframework

Camping is a web framework which consistently stays at less than 4kb of code. You can probably view the complete source code on a single page. But, you know, it’s so small that, if you think about it, what can it really do?

The idea here is to store a complete fledgling web application in a single file like many small CGIs. But to organize it as a Model-View-Controller application like Rails does. You can then easily move it to Rails once you’ve got it going.

A skeleton might be:

require 'camping'

module Camping::Models
  class Post < Base; belongs_to :user; end
  class Comment < Base; belongs_to :user; end
  class User < Base; end
end

module Camping::Controllers
  class Index < R '/'
    def get
      @posts = Post.find :all
      render :index
    end
  end
end

module Camping::Views
  def layout
    html do
      body do
        self << yield
      end
    end
  end

  def index
    for post in @posts
      h1 post.title
    end
  end
end

if __FILE__ == $0
  Camping::Models::Base.establish_connection :adapter => 'sqlite3', :database => 'blog3.db'
  Camping::Models::Base.logger = Logger.new('camping.log')
  Camping.run
end

Some things you might have noticed:

• Camping::Models uses ActiveRecord to do its work. We love ActiveRecord!

• Camping::Controllers can be assigned URLs in the class definition. Neat?

• Camping::Views describes HTML using pure Ruby. Markup as Ruby, which we call Markaby.

If you want to write larger applications with Camping, you are encouraged to split the application into distinct parts which can be mounted at URLs on your web server. You might have a blog at /blog and a wiki at /wiki. Each self-contained. But you can certainly share layouts and models by storing them in plain Ruby scripts.

Interested yet? Okay, okay, one step at a time.

Installation

• gem install camping