mwmitchell-pepper

Welcome to the pepper wiki! Pepper is a Ruby, DSL based framework for creating RESTful web applications. It adheres to the Ruby Rack specification.

Pepper treats every fragment in a URL as a "context". Each context can be mapped to a block or another Pepper enabled module. For example, a URL of:

/users/1/images/1

could translate to a context block tree of:

map 'users' do
  map :digit do
    get{"The value of this user is #{value}"}
    map 'images' do
      map :digit do
        get{"The ID of this image is #{value}"}
      end
    end
  end
end

Because each block maps to a single url fragment, "routing" is not needed. The value of a context's url fragment can be accessed by its :value attribute. You can also name the fragment and propagate to the request params like:

map :user_id=>/\d+/ do
  puts params[:user_id]
end

The :user_id param will then be available as a global request param to other contexts and "actions".

The fragment value passed to :map can be a string, a regular expression or a symbol that matches one of the built-in rules; :digit, :word, etc.

Standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, etc.) are used as the "actions". Each of the actions methods can accept a "rule" hash. The keys map to the REQUEST values (but down-cased and symbolized). So you could execute an action only if it matched the IP, or SERVER_NAME. The value of the rule can be a Regular Expression or a string.

Here is an example:

require 'pepper'

module SeriousApp
  
  class Contact # A delegate/sub-app
    
    include Pepper::Context::Delegate
    
    build do
      before :post do
        # a before :post block. Default is :all.
      end
      
      get{'GET request'}
      post{'POST request'}
      
      # request for /contact/:word
      map :word do
        get{"GET request for /contact/#{value}"}
      end
    end
  end
  
  class Root
    
    include Pepper::App
    
    build do
      get{'A simple GET to /'}
      post{'A POST to /'}
      
      # /about/
      map 'about' do
        get{'GET request for /about'}
      end
      
      # /notes
      map 'notes' do
        get(:server_name=>/^myspecialdomain\.com$/) do
          'GET request for /notes, but only allowing a SERVER_NAME of "myspecialdomain.com"'}
        end
      end
      
      # forwarding /contact to the Contact class
      map 'contact', {}, Contact
    end
    
  end
end

You then instantiate the Root class, and pass it to Rack's "run" method.

run SeriousApp::Root.new