I mentioned in my previous post, that I built my first Ruby project using the Camping framework. I wanted to give some follow up information about that because I think there are somethings about Camping specifically that people new to Ruby or Camping would greatly benefit from.
Here is how to get up to speed with Camping:
Camping is an amazingly brief amount code. In fact from what I can tell, this is a main source of pride for the Camping devs. The uncommented version is only 55 lines of code long. And even the commented version is only 764 lines of code. There are two important points to draw from this. First, if you want to know something about Camping the best reference is the unabridged source. The comments are extensive, and the code is very easy to follow.
Secondly, Camping lets some other Ruby gems do the heavy lifting, which means the documentation about templating(markaby) or ORM(ActiveRecord) is very thin on the Camping site, but each have their own sites with more useful documentation. ActiveRecord is great because it is used in many other Ruby frameworks. Markaby is less used but once you get the hang of overall idea, it is pretty much dead easy to use. Both of these gems are popular enough that it is easy finding information on them if you search for them specifically.
Finally, now that I’ve had some time to think about this a bit. I really like this framework. I will definitely consider using it again. There were times in this project I thought I had made a bad choice on frameworks due to popularity and ease of finding answers for other ones, but this forced me to rely more on reading the Camping source code. Which in turn, was a great thing to be forced into since I was using Luggage as a way to learn Ruby.
Bonus Round: Camping apps work great with Unicorn. Just remove the ActiveRecord dis/connection in the before_fork and after_fork functions from the example file and you’re good to go!