Does a "vertical" framework for RoR make sense?

Question

I have been spending some time creating what I called a framework.

It was aimed at the creation of quiz likes games. It was supposed to have two players syncronized and present them a question to solve, etc.

I would like it to be fully customizable so I tried to develop components that can be put in or out of the pages. In the end the elements became slim ruby methods to add a whole bunch of Javascript and CSS to the pages.

Still the Javascript needs to connect to Ruby so methods supporting it are created but they will only be present when the component is present. Some components depend on one another making everything overly complex.

And after this attempt I wonder, is there is not a better and easier way to make a framework aimed to one kind of application on RoR? Or is the concept flawed or RoR in some way flawed?

Answer 1

Ruby on Rails is a framework on its own accord and is "opinionated software". This means that the writers of Rails looked at what would make most sense for creating a web application to them. Many people support the original developers views and so use Rails for their projects as well.

I think your concept of creating a quiz is a good one, but first you need to understand the rails stack. Depending on what you need exactly, you can create either an engine, plugin or whatever.

What I have seen a lot is that you specify what you need in your controller. (How you do that is up to you). All that information is stored in a class variable and transferred to the view where you can render everything you need with some helpers. The hard part is making it all generic enough to be reusable.

But, maybe Rails isn't the right tool for you. Maybe you need something more lightweight like Merb or even Sinatra.

There is no 'flaw' in Rails. Rails is not the 10**1000-in-one tool Java is. It's a framework that tries to do one way very good in a particular way. I think Rails can be the right tool for you, but you need to be skilled enough to wield the tool :)