Welcome to Renee!

Renee is a new Rack-based library for describing web applications. Sinatra delivered a new simple way to think about building web applications. The popularity of Sinatra both as a library and as a concept shows now enduring the concept really was. Sinatra was different from Rails because the entire DSL was lightweight, easy to read and combined routing and actions into a single file. However, let's consider an example from Sinatra to see where we can improve upon this.

Consider:

get '/blog/:id' do
 Blog.get(params[:id])
end

This is not too bad so far. The repetition of :id is a bit un-DRY, but not bad. Let's keep expanding upon this.

get '/blog/:id' do
 Blog.get(params[:id])
end

put '/blog/:id' do
 Blog.get(params[:id]).update_attributes(params)
end

Now, we've retrieved blog in two places. Time to refactor. We'd normally create a before filter, with the same path.

before '/blog/:id' do
 @blog = Blog.get(params[:id])
end

get '/blog/:id' do
 @blog
end

put '/blog/:id' do
 @blog.update_attributes(params)
end

Now we've repeated the same path three times. With Renee, we can describe these kind of ideas in a simple, easy-to-read way. Here is the equivalent in Renee.

path 'blog' do
 var do |id|
 @blog = Blog.get(id)
 get { halt @blog }
 put { @blog.update(request.params); halt :ok}
 end
end

This web library is inspired by Sinatra, but offers an approach more inline with Rack itself, and lets you maximize code-reuse within your application.