2nd
On the Beauty of Rubinius’ Design (I Wish I Had Rails.new)
In Rubinius, you can spawn off a brand new complete VM by simply calling Rubinius.new. It’ll behave exactly as though it was invoked directly from an rbx binary sitting in your $PATH, complete with STDIN/STDOUT (which you can override). I believe this is one of the basis of how Rubinius’ multi-VM architecture works.
Anyway, I bring this up because I really, really wish Rails was architected in a similar fashion. I am building a CMS on top of Rails and would love to get my hands on a Rails.new if there ever was one. Here’s why.
In a CMS setting, very little of what Rails offers out of the box is usable. You don’t have access to Rails routes so from the very beginning, you don’t have Rails automatically invoking the right controller, the right action and rendering the right view. This doesn’t make sense anyway - you don’t expect your CMS users to start writing controller code in your web editor, do you? (Unless you are Heroku.)
On a slight tangent, the assumption when writing a CMS is that when you ship, you would have written every conceivable controller and model there is (views don’t fall into this because users are generally familiar with the concept of customizable templates). One strategy to extend your “frozen code base” is via the use of widgets and third-party apps (like Facebook) so that you can create seemingly new pages served by custom controllers.
So how do you design a CMS? I’ve been prototyping something for the past week and came up for a breather to check out how other people have solved it. I am delightfully surprised to find out that Radiant does it very close to what I have. In particular, Radiant has one single controller that accepts all requests (lets ignore the entire admin portion for the time being). Based on the path array (provided by the globbed route), it decides what to do / where to dispatch. It takes care of locating the page that corresponds to the URL (it uses a Page model), rendering it and returning the result to the user. It is interesting to note that Radiant directly manipulates the request and response objects, something that Rails developers almost never had to reach for in a regular app. On the other hand, I am exploring the use of serializing the templates to disk and simply calling render :template on it.
Wait a minute. Holy cow, we just built (a simplified) Rails on top of Rails!
What I’d love to see here instead is a Rails.new method just like Rubinius. Boom, a full blown MVC at your fingertips. Configure it right and there you have your very own CMS with minimal work. Or maybe there is. Lazyweb?
