I’m pleased to announce Lotus: the Open Source project I’ve conceived, hacked and built during the last year.
Lotus is a full stack web framework for Ruby, built with lightness, performances and testability in mind. It aims to bring back Object Oriented Programming to web development, leveraging on stable APIs, a minimal DSL, and plain objects.
Standalone frameworks
It’s composed by standalone frameworks (controllers, views, etc..), each one is shipped as an independent gem, in order to remark the separation of concerns. They can be used with any Rack compatible application for a specific need: for instance, Lotus::Router can be used to dispatch HTTP requests for a pool of Sinatra applications.
Full stack application
The other way to use Lotus is to build a full stack application with it, like Rails does. The Lotus gem is designed to enhance those frameworks' features with a few specific conventions.
Philosophy
Lotus is based on simplicity, less DSLs, few conventions, more objects, zero monkey-patching of the core language and standard lib, separation of concerns for MVC layers. It suggests patterns, rather than imposing. It leaves all the freedom to developers to build their own architecture, choose the inheritance structure. It simplifies testability, and encourages single, well defined responsibilities between classes.
Roadmap
Lotus is a complex software, it needs to be completed, and to get feedback in order to became production ready. Some of its frameworks already have reached a certain degree of maturity, other still needs to be crafted as a gem yet. A single release day would be hard to meet as expectation, so I would like to suggest an experiment: to open source a component on the 23rd of every month, starting from January with Lotus::Utils and Lotus::Router.
Happy new year!