Lotus, a web framework for Ruby • Hacker News Board

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#41

Post by zem » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

gnufied wrote: post #20

jaredcwhite wrote: post #12

I'm all for new frameworks that emphasize different ideas and philosophies. If nobody ever tried experimenting with a new approach, we wouldn't have Rails in the first place. So kudos to Luca and his fine work in developing Lotus. I like much of what I see. That being said, I feel like YARWF (Yet Another Ruby Web Framework) is not the most pressing matter in the web space today, and I take exception to the notion tha…

> I want one language that works on both sides and in fact allows OOP code sharing between the two. I think, having one language in both frontend and backend does not work in long run, regardless of your preferred language of choice. we love ruby and yet where I work - we actively maintain Ruby, Python, Javascript and Java applications. Besides, I find it too hard to write OOP code which is reusable within same probl…

there are some great frameworks that do do one language everywhere (my top choices would be om and hoplon from the clojurescript camp, and opa from the custom language camp). there is something to be said for being able to seamlessly pass data around between the frontend and backend, and letting the language and framework handle the low-level details for you.

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#42

Post by cies » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 7:25 PM UTC

Feels like Merb all over again!

Data Mapper, significantly less code, humble core-contributor.

Great work!

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#43

Post by Eleopteryx » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 7:27 PM UTC

yid wrote: post #25

Eleopteryx wrote: post #6

This is depressingly similar to what I was aiming for when I recently began work on: https://github.com/lean-framework/lean (I feel like this happens to me a lot.) Rails controllers are hard to test because actions aren't designed to be testable objects. ActiveRecord models become monolithic because there's no separation of instantiation, validation, persistence, or retrieval. I originally experimented with building…

> This is depressingly similar In graduate school, many a moon ago, my advisor would say that this is validation of the idea, so one should be happy to be on the right track.

Thanks for the de-demotivation.

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#44

Post by Eleopteryx » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 7:27 PM UTC

cies wrote: post #42

Feels like Merb all over again! Data Mapper, significantly less code, humble core-contributor. Great work!

I really liked Merb, and stuck by it for some time. Rails 3 was supposed to be Merb 2. It wasn't really, but Merb was still lost to the "merge".

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#45

Post by Skoofoo » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 7:30 PM UTC

jaredcwhite wrote: post #12

I'm all for new frameworks that emphasize different ideas and philosophies. If nobody ever tried experimenting with a new approach, we wouldn't have Rails in the first place. So kudos to Luca and his fine work in developing Lotus. I like much of what I see. That being said, I feel like YARWF (Yet Another Ruby Web Framework) is not the most pressing matter in the web space today, and I take exception to the notion tha…

Vienna is a Ruby web front-end framework that looks promising. https://github.com/opal/vienna

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#46

Post by rhizome » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 7:30 PM UTC

thecoffman wrote: post #21

jaredcwhite wrote: post #12

I'm all for new frameworks that emphasize different ideas and philosophies. If nobody ever tried experimenting with a new approach, we wouldn't have Rails in the first place. So kudos to Luca and his fine work in developing Lotus. I like much of what I see. That being said, I feel like YARWF (Yet Another Ruby Web Framework) is not the most pressing matter in the web space today, and I take exception to the notion tha…

>A complete web framework has client-side components that facilitate two-way communication to/from the server, data binding, HTML5 history state-based page/view swapping, etc. In other words, the type of stuff being addressed by Angular, etc. No. I can't possibly disagree with this any more strongly. I'm probably on the wrong side of history here, but Javascript absolutely should _not_ be a requirement for using a we…

I suspect that many sites simply do not have staff and/or resources capable of producing NoScript-friendly (degradable) work.

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#47

Post by rakoo » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 7:38 PM UTC

thecoffman wrote: post #21

jaredcwhite wrote: post #12

I'm all for new frameworks that emphasize different ideas and philosophies. If nobody ever tried experimenting with a new approach, we wouldn't have Rails in the first place. So kudos to Luca and his fine work in developing Lotus. I like much of what I see. That being said, I feel like YARWF (Yet Another Ruby Web Framework) is not the most pressing matter in the web space today, and I take exception to the notion tha…

>A complete web framework has client-side components that facilitate two-way communication to/from the server, data binding, HTML5 history state-based page/view swapping, etc. In other words, the type of stuff being addressed by Angular, etc. No. I can't possibly disagree with this any more strongly. I'm probably on the wrong side of history here, but Javascript absolutely should _not_ be a requirement for using a we…

I used to think like you, but I've since understood since that this is the wrong battle. You have 2 things that are more and more diverging yet use the same platform for distribution:

- websites as-you-know-them, which goal is to provide _information_

- webapps, which goal is to provide _services_

Your point of view is completely valid for the first kind: when you want the information, you don't want the frills that go around it. You want clear pointers to it in the form of clean URLs. You want it to be accessible on your smartphone that doesn't run javascript because it's heavy and has wildly different inputs.

But the second kind is completely different. When you (as in the general you) are using GMail, you actually want to use an application to manage your mail, possibly send and receive them. Whether it's in your chrome browser or native in your OS matters only as far as how easy it is to install, and on that point the web has won. But it's just a happy accident of how things have evolved.

You are not against javascript per se, you are against web apps in general. Which is totally understandable, because there are better ways to provide services on a computer than using a shiny HTML+CSS+Javascript interpreter that fetches programs on-the-fly and can't even do half of what a real OS can do.

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#48

Post by alttab » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 7:59 PM UTC

Eleopteryx wrote: post #43

yid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is depressingly similar In graduate school, many a moon ago, my advisor would say that this is validation of the idea, so one should be happy to be on the right track.

Thanks for the de-demotivation.

I don't see it as such. I see it as "independently arriving at the same, correct solution." This is vision, not just skill. You don't see a lot of that. You probably just got distracted by another, harder problem once you realized you could see the end of the project.

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#49

Post by alttab » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 8:01 PM UTC

gnufied wrote: post #20

jaredcwhite wrote: post #12

I'm all for new frameworks that emphasize different ideas and philosophies. If nobody ever tried experimenting with a new approach, we wouldn't have Rails in the first place. So kudos to Luca and his fine work in developing Lotus. I like much of what I see. That being said, I feel like YARWF (Yet Another Ruby Web Framework) is not the most pressing matter in the web space today, and I take exception to the notion tha…

> I want one language that works on both sides and in fact allows OOP code sharing between the two. I think, having one language in both frontend and backend does not work in long run, regardless of your preferred language of choice. we love ruby and yet where I work - we actively maintain Ruby, Python, Javascript and Java applications. Besides, I find it too hard to write OOP code which is reusable within same probl…

This can happen with knockout and other libraries when you end up dumping data into an object to send over simply to render it view side. You end up with a lot of wires between your controller and the view template rendered on the client side.

Re: Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

#50

Post by tinco » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 8:05 PM UTC

Weird, I get the idea of defining a new web framework API, but why would you build everything from scratch? There's loads of very good open source code out there.

Why not fork DataMapper for Lotus::Model for example? Now you have some dodgy hand rolled library that's probably not seen enough eyes to be really production proof.