After stumbling across Ramaze a few weeks ago, I knew I had finally found the Ruby web framework I’d been waiting for. It’s still young and the documentation is still sparse, but the code is so clear and well-commented (and the folks in #ramaze on freenode were so helpful) that it only took me a week or so of frenzied hacking to completely rebuild wonko.com in Ruby. You’re looking at the result.
The only significant user-visible change is that the search feature is now powered by the Yahoo! Search developer API. Try it out; I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how well it works.
I’ll post more about Ramaze and Thoth (my new blog engine) later. In the meantime, if you’re curious, you can find the code here.
Comments
RSS
Just a note- your new guts broke your RSS.
Deployment
How do you have your Ramaze app deployed? (I'm guessing Apache in the front proxying to Mongrel). How much memory does your Mongrel instances take up?
Re: RSS & Deployment
steve: Should be fixed now, thanks.
Rob: Yep, it's Apache proxying to Evented Mongrel. At the moment it appears to be consuming about 34MB, which is roughly equivalent to the size of a typical Apache httpd process running mod_php. So far performance is excellent.
Why the change?
I have used pants as a programming reference and a base for other projects I have been involved with. I love php and use it every chance I get. Having said this, I am considering expanding my skillset to Ruby - which I know little about. I am interested in hearing why you made the switch, why Ruby, how is it better then php, etc?
.: K
Re: Why the change?
I've preferred Ruby to PHP for quite a while. The only thing keeping me from writing web apps in Ruby was the lack of a framework that didn't annoy the crap out of me. Ramaze finally came along and filled that void, so I switched.
The biggest difference between Ruby and PHP is Ruby's sheer beauty. It's an expressive and elegant language that's incredibly well designed, whereas PHP is about as far from elegant as you can get and wasn't "designed" so much as "cobbled together piece by piece". Which isn't to say that PHP is bad — it has its strengths — but Ruby is so much more fulfilling.
Design stuff
Hey, I'd be interested in hearing about which template engine and ORM you chose for this project, why you selected them, and maybe a little about your experience (surprises, familiar aspects, likes and dislikes) writing Riposte. :-)
Re: Design stuff
Ask and ye shall receive.