vundabar

Vundabar

Vundabar is a lightweight portable ruby web framework modelled after Rails and inspired by Sinatra. It is an attempt to understand the awesome features of Rails by reimplementing something similar from scratch.

Vundabar is ligthweight and hence fit for simple and quick applications. Since it is a light weight framework it is very fast.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'vundabar'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install vundabar

Usage

When creating a new Vundabar app, a few things need to be setup and a few rules adhered to. Vundabar basically follows the same folder structure as a typical rails app with all of the model, view and controller code packed inside of an app folder, configuration based code placed inside a config folder and the main database file in a db folder.

View a sample app built using Vundabar framework Here

Key Features

Routing

Routing with Vundabar deals with directing requests to the appropriate controllers. A sample route file is:

TodoApplication.routes.draw do
  get "/todo", to: "todo#index"
  get "/todo/new", to: "todo#new"
  post "/todo", to: "todo#create"
  get "/todo/:id", to: "todo#show"
  get "/todo/:id/edit", to: "todo#edit"
  patch "/todo/:id", to: "todo#update"
  put "/todo/:id", to: "todo#update"
  delete "/todo/:id", to: "todo#destroy"
end

Vundabar supports GET, DELETE, PATCH, POST, PUT requests.

Models

All models to be used with the Vundabar framework are to inherit from the BaseModel class provided by Vundabar, in order to access the rich ORM functionalities provided. The BaseModel class acts as an interface between the model class and its database representation. A sample model file is provided below:

class Todo < Vundabar::BaseModel
  to_table :todos
  property :id, type: :integer, primary_key: true
  property :title, type: :text, nullable: false
  property :body, type: :text, nullable: false
  property :status, type: :text, nullable: false
  property :created_at, type: :text, nullable: false
  create_table
end

The to_table method provided stores the table name used while creating the table record in the database.

The property method is provided to declare table columns, and their properties. The first argument to property is the column name, while subsequent hash arguments are used to provide information about properties.

The type argument represents the data type of the column. Supported data types by Vundabar are:

• integer (for numeric values)
• boolean (for boolean values [true or false])
• text (for alphanumeric values)

The primary_key argument is used to specify that the column should be used as the primary key of the table. If this is an integer, the value is auto-incremented by the database.

The nullable argument is used to specify whether a column should have null values, or not.

On passing in the table name, and its properties, a call should be made to the create_table method to persist the model to database by creating the table.

Controllers

Controllers are key to the MVC structure, as they handle receiving requests, interacting with the database, and providing responses. Controllers are placed in the controllers folder, which is nested in the app folder.

All controllers should inherit from the BaseController class provided by Vundabar to inherit methods which simplify accessing request parameters and returning responses by rendering views.

A sample structure for a controller file is:

class TodoController < Vundabar::BaseController
  def index
    @todos = Todo.all
  end

  def new
  end

  def show
    todo = Todo.find(params[:id])
  end

  def destroy
    todo.destroy
    redirect_to "/"
  end
end

Instance variables set by the controllers are passed to the routes while rendering responses.

Explicitly calling render to render template files is optional. If it's not called by the controller action, then it's done automatically by the framework with an argument that's the same name as the action. Thus, you can decide to call render explicitly when you want to render a view with a name different from the action. You can also use relationships similar to rails. has_many and belongs_to are available.

Views

Currently, view templates are handled through the Tilt gem, with the Erubis template engine. See https://github.com/rtomayko/tilt for more details.

View templates are mapped to controller actions and must assume the same nomenclature as their respective actions.Erbuis is used as the templating engine and files which are views are required to have the .erb file extension after the .html extension. Views are placed inside the app/views folder. A view to be rendered for the new action in the todoController for example is saved as new.html.erb in the todo folder, nested in the views folder.

External Dependencies

The Vundabar framework has a few dependencies. These are listed below, with links to source pages for each.

• sqlite3 - https://github.com/sparklemotion/sqlite3-ruby
• erubis - https://rubygems.org/gems/erubis
• bundler - https://github.com/bundler/bundler
• rake - https://github.com/ruby/rake
• rack - https://github.com/rack/rack
• rack-test - https://github.com/brynary/rack-test
• rspec - https://github.com/rspec/rspec
• tilt - https://github.com/rtomayko/tilt

Running the tests

Test files are placed inside the spec folder and have been split into two sub folders, one for unit tests and the other for integration tests. You can run the tests from your command line client by typing rspec spec

Generators

There are a few generators available in the vundabar framework.

new generator similar to rails is used to create the skeleton of the whole app. To use this generator, run vundabar new <app_name>. This will create a folder called <app_name> with the neccesary structure for your new app. version generator can be used to check the version of the gem that you are using. server generator can be used to start the server to your new application. To use this, run vundabar server or simply vundabar s.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

##Limitations

This version of the gem does not implement callbacks, support migration generation and generating schema.

Contributing

To contribute to this work:

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[andela-oeyiowuawi]/Vundabar )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request
6. Wait

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.