Camping

I started playing with Camping yesterday. Camping is ruby web microframework with the explicit goal of taking less than 4k of space. This implies a sparse, simple interface, and for those (like me) who are fitting their web apps into a 256M slice at slicehost, makes for much less memory usage than a rails app, or even a merb app. The idea is that for a simple application, rails is overkill. I'm thinking of it as a way to build json-accessible REST microapps.

I really like the simplicity of routes being defined with a regular expression right at the controller definition.

module Hello::Controllers
  class Index < R '/', '/snips'
    def get
      @snippets = Snippet.find :all
      render :index
    end
  end
end

That said, it took me more code than I would have liked to get a CRUD interface for a simple model. Not even looking at the views, here is the controller code I ended up with:

module Hello::Controllers
  class Index < R '/', '/snips'
    def get
      @snippets = Snippet.find :all
      render :index
    end
  end
  class New < R '/snips/new'
    def get
      @snippet = Snippet.new
      render :new
    end
    def post
      snip = Snippet.create(:title => input.title,
                            :body => input.body)
      redirect Show, snip.id
    end
  end
  class Show < R '/snips/(\d+)'
    def get(id)
      @snippet = Snippet.find(id)
      render :show
    end
  end
  class Edit < R '/snips/edit/(\d+)'
    def get(id)
      @snippet = Snippet.find(id)
      render :edit
    end
    def post(id)
      Snippet.find(id).update_attributes(:title => input.title,
                                          :body => input.body)
      redirect Show, id
    end
  end
end

I'd like to make this a little tighter, and make it a little more purely RESTful (especially for my idea of using these as REST-based microapps), but I'm not sure the right way to do that yet. Camping doesn't inherently have anything like the rails _method hack for the missing put/delete http verbs, and the only thing googling has been able to turn up is a plugin that hasn't been touched in over a year called Sleeping Bag. I'll take a look at that and see how it goes.