Kul vs Rails

After having used it for a while, I think the time has come to kill deprecate Kul. Building it has taught me a great deal about many things, not least of which is just how complex Rails is.

The big sticking point I had with Rails is the router. Everything else in Rails is workable, and there's no reason to discard all of that code just to fix the router. I'm sure that I can convince rails to look in the views folders for the controller, and skipping ActiveRecord is simple and well-documented.

What I discovered the other day is that the Rails router can delegate straight to a Rack application. Which means that it's just a single line in the routes.rb (and an entire rack implementation I suppose) that will put my nifty routing / controller DSL plan in place.

Like Kul, this will probably be more of an experiment for learning purposes than a serious project. The Rails router and controllers really do a lot of work, and it's probably not a good idea to hijack them in production. But it should be fun to play with.

First thing is to switch Twitarr over to Rails. Unfortunately at this point I'm busy trying to learn Ember.js, which is not a trivial web framework. The value is there, but the documentation makes it very difficult.