Wee Web Framework

Copyright and License

Released under the same terms of license as Ruby.

Introduction

Wee is a light-weight, very high-level and modern web-framework that makes Web engineering easy. It mainly inherits many ideas and features from Seaside, but was written from scratch without ever looking at the Seaside (or any other) sources. All code was developed from ideas and lots of discussions with Avi Bryant.

Features

Reusable components

Wee has real components, which are like widgets in a GUI. Once written, you can use them everywhere. They are completely independent and do not interfere with other components. Components encapsulate state, a view and actions. Of course you can use an external model or use templates for rendering.

Backtracking

See the What is backtracking? section below. In short, backtracking lets the browser’s back and forward-button play well together with your application.

Clean and concise

Wee is well thought out, is written in and supports clean and concise code. Furthermore I think most parts are now very well documented.

Templating-independent

Wee does not depend on a special templating-engine. You can use a different templating engine for each component if you want.

Powerful programmatic HTML generation

Wee ships with an easy to use and very powerful programmatic HTML-generation library. For example you can create a select list easily with this piece of code:

# select an object from these items
items = [1, 2, 3, 4]

# the labels shown to the user
labels = items.map {|i| i.to_s}

# render it
r.select_list(items).labels(labels).callback {|choosen| p choosen}

# render a multi-select list, with objects 2 and 4 selected
r.select_list(items).multi.labels(labels).selected([2,4])

The callback is called with the selected objects from the items array. Items can be any object, even whole components:

labels = ["msg1", "msg2"]
items = labels.collect {|m| MessageBox.new(m)}
r.select_list(items).labels(labels).callback {|choosen| call choosen.first}

Observations and Limitations

Components are thread-safe by nature as a fresh components-tree is created for each session and requests inside a session are serialized.

What is backtracking?

If you want, you can make the back-button of your browser work correctly together with your web-application. Imagine you have a simple counter application, which shows the current count and two links inc and dec with which you can increase or decrease the current count. Starting with an inital count of 0 you increase the counter up to 8, then click three times the back button of your browser (now displays 5). Finally you decrease by one and your counter shows what you’d have expected: 4. In contrast, traditional web applications would have shown 7, because the back button usually does not trigger a HTTP request and as such the server-side state still has a value of 8 for the counter when the request to decrease comes in.

The solution to this problem is to take snapshots of the components state after an action is performed and restoring the state before peforming actions. Each action generates a new state, which is indicated by a so-called page-id within the URL.

Decorations

Decorations are used to modify the look and behaviour of a component without modifying the components tree itself. A component can have more than one decoration. Decorations are implemented as a linked list (Wee::Decoration#next points to the next decoration), starting at Wee::Component#decoration, which either points to the next decoration in the chain, or to itself.

The request/response cycle

The request/response cycle in Wee is actually split into two separate phases.

Render Phase

The rendering phase is assumed to be side-effect free! So, you as a programmer should take care to meet this assumption. Rendering is performed by method Wee::Component#render!.

Action Phase (Invoking Callbacks)

Possible sources for callbacks are links (anchors) and all kinds of form-elements like submit buttons, input-fields etc. There are two different kinds of callbacks:

Input callbacks (input-fields)
Action callbacks (anchor, submit-button)

The distinction between input and action callbacks is important, as action callbacks might depend on values of input-fields being assigned to instance variables of the controlling component. Hence, Wee first invokes all input callbacks before any action callback is triggered. Callback processing is performed by method Wee::Component#process_callbacks.

The result of the action phase is an updated components state. As such, a snapshot is taken of the new state and stored under a new page-id. Then, a redirect requests is sent back to the client, including this new page-id. The client automatically follows this redirect and triggers a render phase of the new page.