Dolphy

Dolphy is an incredibly small (~200 LOC) web framework written in Ruby and based on Rack. It was originally mimicking the behavior of Sinatra, but as time has passed, it has slightly changed direction and is now more of a mix between different web frameworks.

It has solely been written for the purpose of learning and is not meant to be used in production.

There are a lot of things I want to do to improve the code and functionality of this project. I try to list these things in the issues. Feel free to fork this repository and contribute if you want to help me implement features or fix bugs.

• Ruby 2.1.0 or newer.

Add this line to your Gemfile:

gem 'dolphy'

And then run:

bundle

Or simply install it yourself as:

gem install dolphy

Create a file app.rb:

require 'dolphy'

Dolphy.app do
  Dolphy.router do
    get '/' do
      "Hello, world!"
    end
  end
end.serve!

Run the file:

ruby app.rb

Open the browser at http://localhost:8080.

• Setup blocks
• Template engines
• Routes

A Dolphy application has a couple of default configurations that you can change based on your needs through the setup block.

It uses the Dolphy::TemplateEngines::ErbEngine by default, and it uses ./views/ to find the view files it needs. These can be configured in this way:

require 'dolphy'

Dolphy.app do
  setup do |app|
    app.settings[:template_engine] = Dolphy::TemplateEngines::HamlEngine
    app.settings[:view_path] = "./somewhere/else/views/"
  end

  Dolphy.router do
    get '/' do
      "Hello, world!"
    end
  end
end.serve!

Since the Dolphy::Settings is basically just a hash, we can read from and write to, we can also define our own settings to use in the views. We could for instance define a title for a page by adding app.settings[:title] = "Building things with Dolphy" in the setup block, which we can access in this way:

Dolphy.app do
  setup do |app|
    app.settings[:title] = "Building things with Dolphy"
  end

  Dolphy.router do
    get '/' do
      render :index, title: settings[:title]
    end
  end
end.serve!

Dolphy supports Haml and ERB by default through the Dolphy::TemplateEngines::HamlEngine and Dolphy::TemplateEngine::ErbEngine (which relies on Tilt under the hood), but we can effortlessly build our own template engines and use these in our application.

A template engine should have a .render method with three arguments: a template_name, a hash with locals and finally a view_path.

Imagine we want our views to use Liquid, then we just need to define a new LiquidEngine and make it our template engine in the setup block:

class LiquidEngine
  def self.render(template_name, locals = {}, view_path = "./views/")
    path = File.expand_path("#{view_path}#{template_name.to_s}.html", Dir.pwd)
    template = Tilt::LiquidTemplate.new(path)
    template.render(Object.new, locals)
  end
end

Dolphy.app do
  setup do |app|
    app.settings[:template_engine] = LiquidEngine
  end

  Dolphy.router do
    get '/' do
      render :new_page
    end
  end
end.serve!

The routing layer should look familiar if you've already worked with other Ruby frameworks. We can override routes with variables by adding a new route, and we use :name to access variables in the routes:

require 'dolphy'

Dolphy.app do
  Dolphy.router do
    get '/hello/:name' do |name|
      render :hello, name: name
    end

    get '/hello/you'
      render :hello_you
    end
  end
end.serve!

In this case, any request to /hello/bob will render the hello template with the name variable set to "bob", while any request to /hello/you will simply just render the hello_you template. The opposite order will not work, so the ordering is quite important.

I've been looking in my directions for inspiration. I probably owe some credit to Camping, Cuba, NYNY, and obviously Sinatra and Rails.

1. Fork it.
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some new feature.').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature).
5. Create a new pull request.

See LICENSE. Copyright (c) 2014 Mathias Jean Johansen <mathias@mjj.io>