Well, okay, yes, we already know Ruby is expressive. And, if I know you, you’ll see a drop of awesomeness in:

 BOARD_MEMBERS = ['Jan', 'Julie', 'Archie', 'Stewick']
 HISTORIANS = ['Braith', 'Dewey', 'Eduardo']

 case name
 when *BOARD_MEMBERS
   "You're on the board!  A congratulations is in order." 
 when *HISTORIANS
   "You are busy chronicling every deft play." 
 end

I was refactoring a parser and it occured to me that I could just do a when *tokens.keys at one point. Ruby treats it just like a list of conditions. Consider Olympic ice dancing out-graced!

Addendum: I’m just gonna log a few of the other discoveries implied here, just to prove how handily this waxes if..include?’s sorry snout.

 case name when "Arthur", *BOARD_MEMBERS
   "Either you are a board member... or you are Arthur." 
 end

 case name when *BOARD_MEMBERS|HISTORIANS
   "We welcome you all to the First International
    Symposium of Board Members and Historians Alike." 
 end

Okay, you can try out Camping 1.3.69 from gems. Camping is a microframework. Railsish aesthetics for wee CGIs.

 gem install camping --source code.whytheluckystiff.net

Sessioning

To get sessions working for your application:

1. require 'camping/session'
2. In your application’s create method, add a call to Camping::Models::Schema.create_schema
3. Throughout your application, use the @state var like a hash to store your application’s data.

More notes about this at CampingSessions on the wiki.

Helpers#URL

Builds a complete URL to a controller route or a path, returning a URI object.

Assuming the Hoodwink.d app is mounted at http://localhost:3301/hoodwinkd/, in a controller or view you’ll see the following results:

  >> URL()
  => (URI:http://localhost:3301/hoodwinkd/)
  >> self.URL
  => (URI:http://localhost:3301/hoodwinkd/)
  >> URL(Static, 'js/prototype.js')
  => (URI:http://localhost:3301/hoodwinkd/static/js/prototype.js)
  >> URL("/boingboing.net/setup")
  => (URI:http://localhost:3301/hoodwinkd/boingboing.net/setup)
  >> URL("http://google.com")
  => (URI:http://google.com/)

Find it also in the new docs.

Service Overrides

Adding stuff like sessioning and authentication demands hooks on the controller. Rails uses hooks like before_filter to do this. Camping doesn’t have bytes to spare to make this happen, but things have been re-stacked to let you slide in new service methods which intercept all controller calls.

 class LoginError < Exception; end
 module ClownsOnly
   def service(*a)
     unless @state.occupation == :clown
       raise LoginError, "For clown's eyes only." 
     end
     super(*a)
   end
 end

This service method can be slid into your application’s top module like so:

 Camping.goes :Blog

 module Blog
   include ClownsOnly
 end

Fully explained at Before and After Overrides on the wiki.

Good thing gabriele renzi is out there, because I’ve been off my shoe this week. Funny story: he was out reading blogs and he stumbled acrosst a real blog’s post. Namely, Minero Aoki has Rails running on YARV 0.4.0.

 /var/www/rails/testsite % /usr/local/pkg/yarv/bin/ruby script/server
 => Booting WEBrick...
 => Rails application started on http://0.0.0.0:3000
 => Ctrl-C to shutdown server; call with --help for options
 [2006-02-20 10:40:23] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
 [2006-02-20 10:40:23] INFO  ruby 1.9.0 (2006-02-14) [x86_64-linux]
 [2006-02-20 10:40:23] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=25032 port=3000

This is just like that feeling you get when you look up in the sky and a legion of manskunks is carrying your uncle away. Apocalycious. (gabriele’s blog is right here.)

To be clear: Like Chris Williams says, this isn’t like stable or anything. It’s just one of those, you know, hey, wow, YARV is really spreading its wings here.