🧽 Porous

Porous is a web engine that uses isomorphic Ruby components to build a Progressive Web App. Its use is analogous to a web framework, but the approach is entirely different. You write only the code that is unique to your application and the engine takes care of the rest!

This project is a work-in-progress and is not yet even in the Proof of Concept phase. However, if you are interested in a full-stack, everything included solution, that only requires you to use one language (that is arguably easy and enjoyable to write) then feel free to follow this project.

The closest thing to this I could find was Volt or Silica, neither of which are active or match the overall development flow I'm looking for.

• 🙅 No bundled runtime (only code unique to your app needs to be in your repository)
• 🖥️ Server-side rendering (server responds with the entire initial page populated for SEO)
• 💻 Client-side rendering (application bundle is served and interactions and subsequent pages are rendered client-side)
• 🌄 Serves static files (from static folder)
• 🔥 Hot reloading (via WebSocket push and browser refresh)

Applications are composed of Pages which are in turn composed of Components. Data is persisted as Entitys in configurable store options (memory, disk, database). Client-server communication occurs as Events over WebSockets.

A page is conceptually similar to what would be rendered when visiting a specific URL. So www.example.com/blog/45 might render a Blog page, while www.example.com/login might render a Login page. Generally, code contained in pages are not reused.

A component is any composable unit of code responsible for rendering markup, potentially based on some state. This is somewhat equivalent to Web Components, in that it can also have some behaviour attached. But it can also simply be used to remove code duplication. Essentially any markup that has behaviour attached or would otherwise create code duplication should probably be in Components.

Data in a Porous application is stored as entities. An Entity is a agglomeration of virtual attributes constructed from Datoms – pieces of information we know to be true about that entity at a point in time. In this way, full history of an entity is automatically maintained. Datoms are immutable, allowing for simpler synchronisation between client and server.

Every user maintains one open channel (WebSocket) to the server which can be used to send and receive Events. This is the sole communication mechanism and is used for "database queries", push notifications, presence, analytics, etc.

Porous is not a framework. You don't build an application with it as a dependency, you run it with your application configuration as input. As such you can easily install the gem globally to use it:

$ gem install porous

Porous is still pre-alpha and so is not ready for usage yet, but the general idea is that you would define your application's entities, pages, components and events in Ruby scripts structured in a specific way. Then you would simply run porous server while pointing it to that folder and it will spin up a Rack-compatible web server for you to use.

⚠️ Expect any and all APIs to change radically until version 1.0! Hence why it won't be documented or properly tested until things settle to a more stable state.

To start a new Porous project simply gem install porous using whichever Ruby environment you want to use (Ruby 3.0+) and then porous new with your project name. Then change to that directory and run:

$ porous dev

By default Porous will run at localhost:9292. Now you can edit pages/home.rb or add more pages. Files you modify will be hot-reloaded, so you can simply open the page in your browser and edit the file.

To test out an example application using Porous you can clone the Porous website and in that directory:

$ porous dev

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/exastencil/porous. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Porous project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.

I'd like to thank Michał Kalbarczyk (fazibear) for his work done on Inesita and his VirtualDOM wrapper which served as the starting point for my implementation of Porous. While my final approach may deviate significantly from theirs, having code to review and a workable starting point was invaluable.