Copyright (c) 2008 Michael Fellinger [email protected]

All files in this distribution are subject to the terms of the Ruby license.

About Ramaze

Ramaze is a very simple and straight-forward web-framework. The philosophy of it could be expressed in a mix of KISS and POLS, trying to make simple things simple and complex things possible.

This of course is nothing new to anyone who knows some ruby, but is often forgotten in a chase for new functionality and features. Ramaze only tries to give you the ultimate tools, but you have to use them yourself to achieve perfect custom-tailored results.

Another one of the goals during development of Ramaze was to make every part as modular and therefor reuasable as possible, not only to provide a basic understanding after the first glance, but also to make it as simple as possible to reuse parts of the code.

The original purpose of Ramaze was to act as a kind of framework to build web-frameworks, this was made obsolete by the introduction of rack, which provides this feature at a better level without trying to enforce any structural layout of the resulting framework.

Features Overview

Ramaze offers following features at the moment:

  • Adapters

Ramaze takes advantage of the rack library to provide a common way of handling different ways to serve its content.

Rack supports at the moment:

* [Mongrel](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/)

  Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for
  hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than
  FastCGI or SCGI.

* [WEBrick](http://www.webrick.org/)

  WEBrick is a Ruby library program to build HTTP servers.

* CGI

  CGI is the Common Gateway Interface and is one of the most basic ways
  to integrate into Webservers like Apache or Lighttpd.

* FCGI

  Improvment of CGI as it doesn't start up a new connection to Ramaze on
  every request.

  • Templates

    Amrita2 is a xml/xhtml template library for Ruby. It makes html documents from a template and a model data.

    Erubis is a fast, secure, and very extensible implementation of eRuby.

    Haml takes your gross, ugly templates and replaces them with veritable Haiku.

    Liquid's syntax and parse model are inspired by Django templates, as well as PHP's smarty.

    Remarkably is a very tiny Markaby-like XML builder

    Markaby means Markup as Ruby.

    Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that‘s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows.

    • Ezamar

    A simple homage to Nitros templating, is shipped together with Ramaze.

  • Cache

    • Hash
    • YAML::Store
    • MemCache

  • Helper

    • Active by default
    • CGI

    Shortcuts for escape/unescape of the CGI module.

    • File

    Helps you serving files from your Controller.

    • Flash

    Store a couple of values for one request associated with a session.

    • Link

    Easier linking to the various parts of your applications Controllers and Actions.

    • Redirect

    Easy redirection.

    • Optional
    • Aspect

    Allows you to wrap different Actions on your Controller with code.

    • Auth

    Simple way to add basic authentication.

    • Cache

    Easy caching Actions and values.

    • Identity

    For ease of use of the OpenID authentication mechanism.

    • Inform

    Wrapping the functionality of Ramazes logging facilities.

    • Markaby

    Allows you to use Markaby in your Controller without having it as the default templating engine.

    • Nitroform

    Hooks up on nitros form builder to help you creating forms from Og objects.

    • OpenID

    Authentication via OpenID made easy.

    • Pager

    Displays a collection of entitities in multiple pages.

    • Partial

    Renders so-called partials.

    • Stack

    Allows you to use a call/answer mechanism for things like redirection to the site a user entered login-forms from.

  • Various

    • Sessions
    • Global configuration system
    • Simple request/response handling
    • Custom sophisticated Error-handling

Basic Principles

There are some basic principles that Ramaze tries to follow:

  • KISS (Keep It Super Simple)

Ramaze doesn't introduce any major change of paradigm for everyone familiar with Ruby and the basics of Web-development.

  • POLS (Principle Of Least Surprise)

Ramaze tries to be intuitive and easy to learn. Most functionality is built in a way to help, not to obfuscate or confuse.

  • Modular design

Use what you want and how you want it.

Through Ruby Ramaze provides one of the most powerful programming-languages available, giving you full control over your system.

Even the most essential parts of Ramaze can easily be replaced and/or modified without losing the advantage of the whole framework.

  • Minimal dependencies

Nothing besides Ruby is required for the basic features.

Of course you can take advantage of several wonderful libraries, but Ramaze is built in a way to be run on any basic setup.

  • Documentation

Document everything, classes, modules, methods, configuration...

Through 100% documentation Ramaze gives the developer easy and solid understanding of the underlying concepts and functionality.

  • Open development

Everyone is welcome to contribute to Ramaze in the easiest way possible. The repository is open for patches passing the Test-suite.

  • Examples

Everyone learns different, some only read the source, others browse documentation, but everyone loves examples for a quick and painless start.

Ramaze addresses this need and offers a wide variety of examples of usage, basic functionality, project-layout and more advanced applications.

  • Fully BDD (Behaviour Driven Design)

Ramaze has a very complete set of so-called specifications built by RSpec. These specs define the way Ramaze has to behave.

The specs are checked every time a new patch is pushed into the repository, deciding whether the changes the patch applies are valid and don't break the framework.

Installation

  • via RubyGems

The simplest way of installing Ramaze is via 

$ gem install ramaze

in case you have RubyGems installed.

  • via git

To get the latest and sweetest, you can just pull from the repository and run Ramaze that way.

  $ git clone git://gitweb.com/manveru/ramaze

Please read the man page or git help for more information about updating and creating your own patches. This is at the moment the premier way to use Ramaze, since it is the way I use it.

Some hints for the usage of Git.

  • use require 'ramaze' from everywhere

    add a file to your site_ruby named 'ramaze.rb' the content should be: "require '/path/to/git/repo/ramaze/lib/ramaze'"

  • get the latest version (from inside the ramaze directory)

    $ git pull

  • Reset the repo to original state (if you screw up something)

    $ git reset --hard # resets the whole repo
$ git checkout master lib/ramaze.rb # revert changes to lib/ramaze.rb only

  • record a patch for all your changes

    $ git commit -a # commit all changes

  • record a patch for specific changes

    $ git add -p # pick the hunks you want to commit
$ git commit

  • output your patches into a bundle ready to be mailed (compress it before sending to make sure it arrives in the way you sent it)

    $ git pull # make sure you are on latest revision to avoid conflicts
$ git format-patch origin/HEAD # spit out 00xx-blah.patch files

# From here on you can use either git-send-email or go the manual route
$ tar -cjf ramaze_bundle.tar.bz2 *.patch
# add this bz2 as attachment and send to [email protected]

Getting Started

Now that you have a vague idea of what you're about to get into you might just want to get a way to get up and running ASAP. Please read below for more information about installation.

Depending on what you are planning to do you can either just go and start reading the source or directly get some hands-on experience by trying some of the examples. Most things will require dependencies though. The basic functionality is provided by the WEBrick adapter and the Template::Ramaze, which just run out of the box. For more features you will have to install some templating-engines and mongrel (very recommended). Ramaze will inform you when it needs further dependencies, so just go and try some things.

Some places to get started are:

  • Read the documentation.
  • Run and read the test cases.
  • Look at the examples and run/modify them.

A couple of Examples

There are some examples for your instant pleasure inside the examples-directory in the Ramaze-distribution. To start up an example, you can use the Ramaze binary located in bin/ramaze for example:

$ ramaze examples/hello.rb

Or:

$ cd examples/blog $ ramaze

Since ramaze uses the start.rb by default if you don't pass anything else.

For more information about the usage of ramaze try:

$ ramaze --help

Examples include:

  • examples/hello.rb Hello, World!

  • examples/simple.rb A bit more advanced than the hello-example, but still very basic.

  • examples/blog Not yet fully functional, but coming along.

  • examples/whywiki A basic examples of a minimalistic application, based on the Wiki of _why in his camping-framework.

  • examples/templates examples of real usage of the templating-engines. Tries to implement the same functionality in each template_*.rb file using a different engine.

How to find Help

For help you can:

Appendix

  • Performance

    • Serving

    For best performance you should consider using Mongrel to host your application.

    • Caching

    You can easily cache your pages using the CacheHelper. Also, using MemCache gives you high-end performance and security.

And thanks to...

There is a large number of people who made Ramaze possibe by their ongoing efforts in the world of open source and by encouraging and helping me.

This list is by no means a full listing of all these people, but I try to get a good coverage despite that.

I would like to thank:

  • Yukihiro Matsumoto a.k.a matz

    For giving the world Ruby and bringing fun back into programming.

  • Zed Shawn a.k.a. zedas

    For developing Mongrel, Ramaze started out as a simple Hello World based on that awesome server.

  • Christian Neukirchen a.k.a chris2

    For building rack, which is just what the numerous web-developers had anticipated and which will, with no doubt, change the world.

  • Pistos

    For continious encouragment and building the first real webpage on Ramaze. His bugreports were invaluable.

  • Jim Weirich

    For Rake, which lifts off a lot of tasks from the shoulders of every developer who uses it.

  • Thomas Sawyer a.k.a Trans

    Dragging me deep into the rabbit-hole and showing me how awesome Ruby truely is through his work on facets, ratchets and tons of other projects.

  • George Moschovitis a.k.a gmosx

    For his tremendous efforts in the Nitro/Og framework, which is a source of steady inspiration for Ramaze and brought me to Ruby in the first place.

  • Rob Levin a.k.a. lilo

    He founded the most excellent Freenode IRC-network, where the most important channels for rubyists are located (as is #ramaze). May he rest in peace.

  • The guys (and gals) in the various channels on Freenode

    As the people are way too many to be listed, here the channels that i call my online home. All the people in there deserve special thanks for getting me hooked to Ruby and providing their help in a friendly and patient manner.

    • #nitro
    • #ruby-de
    • #ruby-lang
    • #rubyforce