16 Oct 07 Ruby out of the Rails – Nitro and Og

The Ruby language, started to grow inside the enterprises and to be “the topic” in many blogs after the Rails framework showed up, but Rails is not the only option for developing web applications with Ruby, there are other frameworks, and one of “the others” is called “Nitro Framework“, thsi one has almost the same age as Rails but it has a lot less documentation and AFAIK a lot less users too.

This post is about my first 30 minutes with Nitro.

One of the better things about rails, and one of the things that you can not do with Nitro is just to change a class while the server is running, and see the change after a refresh in the browser window, but I’ll talk about these problems later …

The Nitro framework, goes through a path different from Rails, while Rails tell you where to put your models, where to put your controllers, where to put your views, …

What I think is a great feature, since when you start working in a new project you already know where every thing is, Nitro let you put your stuff just where you want it to be.

What is a nice feature too, but if I want to put things where I want them to be, I’ll use Java as I’m doing for the last 5 years

Nitro is almost a two framework in one, with Nitro you can develop MVC style applications like Rails, but you can write page oriented applications like in PHP or ASP too, and the best thing is that you can mix the two styles too, of course it will increase the complexity of your application, but it can make it a lot easier to work too, you can write what you need using the easier way to accomplish that task.
To start playing with Nitro just run the following commands:

• gem install -y nitro (this one will install Nitro and all its dependencies)
• gen app rocketpower (now let’s create a Nitro application called “rocketpower”m I know they tell you in the home page that it is not rocket science but the name is fun )
• cd rocketpower
• ruby run.rb (I needed to edit the file for it to work, just open it in any editor and add “require ‘rubygems’” in the second line)
• point your browser to http://locahost:9000

Every thing ready, you are running your first Nitro application!

Until now, I think that nitro is more complicated than Rails, probably the lack of documentation contributed a lot to this, the terrible examples have their share in this responsibility too, but Nitro has some cool things too.

If you want to create a page based application, you just need to create some “.xhtml” files and place your Ruby code between <?r and ?>, or if you just want to display some string, do it just like in any Ruby String, placing your code between #{ … }.

Since nitro does not have a fixed directory structure, you need to “require” some of your Ruby files from inside the “run.rb” code, I think that this is the cause of the lack of automatic reloading of your code.

Nitro uses Og for persistence, and Og does not need your persistent objects to extend any class, it will persist any object that uses any of it’s “property definition helpers”, itlooks for an automatic created method called “serializable_attributes”, I think it is more the “ruby way”, since it uses “Duck Typing” instead of hierarchy.

Nitro does not have any thing like “migrations”, at least I did not find it yet, and I really like Rails Migrations.

I found the source code for Nitro and Og easier to read and understand than the Rails code, but the code for the Rails applications is a lot cleaner and easier to read.

One thing that I found cool about nitro is that they use the explicit parameters for almost all methods, when rails use hashes for almost every thing, both approaches have advantages …

The example I wanted to write for this post will be published another time, because I need to study a little more about Nitro and Og to develop any thing that I’m not ashamed of publishing.

They do not follow a standard directory structure even in the sample applications, in some of them the code is in the source directory, in others it is in the app directory, the only standard is that the public things (style sheets, images, …) are in a directory called public.

For now, they (Nitro and Og) looks like they need more work, they stopped in time for a while, and the development restarted now with the “Rails Boom“.

Nitro has some cool things, but at least for now, I’ll use Rails for my projects (at least the ones that aren’t in Java)

Portuguese version Here.

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Tags: framework, howto, nitro, og, rails, review, ruby