What’s Ramaze?

Ramaze is a fabulous framework that lets you create web applications in Ruby with a minimum of code.

Why Ramaze?

With king of the hill Rails chugging along, and up-and-comer Merb picking up steam, why bother with Ramaze? (If you don’t care about the rationale, you can skip right to the beginning of the tutorial.)

The number one* thing that makes Ramaze stand out from the crowd is that you write very little code and you write it all yourself. No generators.

“No generators!? How will I survive? What kind of mad scheme is this?” Relax. It’s all good. Why? It’s all a matter of philosophy.

The Ramaze philosophy

Before Rails, people wrote lots and lots of code when making a web app, and they did it over and over as they did web app after web app. With each new app, they would spend time “ramping up” with just the base application before they got into the real meat of the matter, the core functionality which varied from client to client, application to application. Rails and Merb and their ilk try to make your life easier by generating this “lots and lots of code” for you, so you don’t have to spend time repeating the motions of getting the skeleton of your application coded.

Ramaze takes a different approach. It asks: How about we dump the “lots and lots of code” part altogether? This way, you get the benefit of nearly nil ramp up time, without the gaping jaw effect that hits you after you run a code generator script and sit staring at the big filetree that just sprouted out of the ground (think Jack and the Beanstalk).

So yeah, it’s a matter of philosophy. Sure, the Rails way works for some people. And that’s cool. But if you’re the kind of person who went to your local neighbourhood Rails tutorial, got to the generator part, and went “Okay, what the heck is all this stuff… I thought we were making a Hello World app?” — well by jove, you’ve come to the right place at the right time. Come! Come, and I will show you a wonderful world where it needn’t be so. A world where your code is tiny, yet powerful, and you understand it all, because it was generated — not by a script that someone else wrote — but by your own God-given clever little noodle.

Web development by example: A Ramaze tutorial

Update: This tutorial applies to Ramaze 2009.03 and prior. It probably won’t work under Ramaze 2009.04+.

Thus begins our adventure into Ramaze, the web framework. I will lead you through the making of a non-trivial Ramaze application, using the same parts and features you would use in your own killer, take-the-world-by-storm web app. You will come to know all the basics, and perhaps even some advanced things, too. Along with Ramaze, I will make use of a real-world database and ORM. My personal choices for these are PostgreSQL and M4DBI, but the same techniques and principles easily apply to other options like MySQL, SQLite, Sequel and DataMapper. I may cover usage of these in the future.

This tutorial is based on the earlier work of manveru, namely his todolist tutorial. It is similar to that one in some ways, but differs in other ways. That tutorial is still a good reference, though, so you may wish to go over it when you’re done with this one.

You should have some familiarity with the basics of Ruby and HTML to learn and use Ramaze, but you need not have any prior experience with web frameworks in general. In fact, you are at an advantage if you do not, since you won’t have any preconceptions, habits or conventions that might negatively bias your first impressions and experiences.

Source Code

The full source code for this repository is available at github.com. Each step of the tutorial is a separate branch which builds upon the previous step. To get the code, you should use git, the great version control system.

git clone git://github.com/Pistos/ramaze-todolist-tutorial.git

If you really don’t want to get or use git, github has download links you can use. You can also browse the code online at github by hovering over the “all branches” tab in the menu bar and selecting a branch. I recommend you use git itself, though, because you will be able to easily switch between branches as we progress through the tutorial:

git checkout 1-database

and you’ll also be able to see what was added and what changed in the codebase from step to step:

git diff 5-controller 6-add-task

Live Support

The Ramaze community is most active in IRC. Our home channel is #ramaze on irc.freenode.net. If you have any questions before, while or after going through this tutorial, feel free to drop by. I myself (Pistos) am there from time to time, but there are usually others around available to answer questions. There’s also the Ramaze mailing list.

So let’s begin with Part 0: Installation and Preparation.

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* “Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise!”

Related posts:

1. Ramaze by Example - Part 0: Installation and Preparation
2. Ruby on Rails - Steering Is Futile
3. M4DBI - Models (and more) for DBI
4. Ramaze by Example - Part 1: Database Schema
5. Managing web application errors with Hoptoad and Ramaze