This has been a great year for Lotus.
At the beginning of 2014 I decided to open source this less invasive and simple framework for Rack.
Back in the day, it was just a software stored in my hard drive. An experiment that turned to be a fresh take for web development with Ruby. It had in it the seminal work of what is Lotus today, but it required patience for its blossoming.
We have the feeling that technology moves fast, but it’s a false myth. All the preparatory work, the countless hours spent to lay foundations and refine details needs a very long time.
What it appears to be an overnight success, it took years instead.
This first one in Lotus' life have traced the right direction for the project. The Community is growing with nice, helpful and inclusive people. I’ve personally mentored a few young programmers in their first Open Source contribution(s) and Lotus is sometimes used to teach web development.
The software is slowly getting stable, feature after feature.
Lotus has also been included in the last issue of ThoughtWorks' Radar as emerging technology to assess in 2015.
A new release
Lotus is a modular web framework. It scales from single file HTTP endpoints to multiple applications in the same Ruby process. Flexibility is at the core. The smart combination of conventions and configurations gives the right balance between convenience and control.
However, we recognized that all this power required some guidance. People would be otherwise lost to understand how to write their first application.
As of today, there is a new version out (v0.2.0) which introduces code generators.
Container architecture
The first architecture that we officially support is: container.
It’s based on a few simple concepts: use cases and applications.
Use cases (features) should be implemented in lib/ with a combination of pure objects and the needed Ruby gems.
One or more Lotus applications live in apps/. They are isolated each other, and depend only on the code in lib/.
Each of them should serve for only one purpose: user facing web application, administrative backend, JSON API, metrics dashboard, etc.
This architecture has important advantages:
- Code reusability. You can consume a feature from the Web UI or from a HTTP API. Each one can be different Lotus application or simple Rack based endpoints.
- Decoupled components. The core of your application depends only on a few gems and it doesn’t need to worry about the Web/HTTP/Console/Background jobs.
- Applications are built like a gem, this ease the process of package them and share between projects, without the need of carry a lot of dependencies.
- Avoid monoliths. Each Lotus application under
apps/is a candidate for later on extraction into a separated microservice.
The last point is crucial. In the early days of a new project is really convenient to build and deploy all the code together. But as the time passes, it can become nearly impossible to extract sets of cohesive functionalities into separated deliverables. Lotus helps to plan those things ahead of time, but without the burden that is required by those choices, because it support multiple applications natively.
Getting started with Lotus is really easy now:
% gem install lotusrb
% lotus new bookshelf
% cd bookshelf && bundle
% bundle exec lotus server # visit http://localhost:2300Other features
This new version brings useful changes:
- Command line tools like console and server with code reloading
- Control on Rack middleware, cookies, sessions, HTTP caching, Conditional GET, MIME types, etc.
- Params whitelisting and validations
- A simplified API for the model layer
- File system database adapter for rapid, schemaless prototyping
- Bug fixes and perf improvements
The future
This 2014 went over my expectations. The plans for the next year will be announced soon.
Until then, I encourage to give it a try: it’s already compatible with Ruby 2.2, which will be released in two days.
As last thing, I’m grateful for all the people who made this release possible. Thank you!
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