Bryan Helmkamp

Presented by Jeremy McAnally

History of the tent…

• Native Americans
• Hippie fests
• Crazy diagrams

What is Camping?

• Web micro-framework
• Code is ~4K – Fits on the slide
• Written by _why the lucky stiff
• Like _why’s book embodied in a framework

• MVC architecture
• ActiveRecord for models
• Markaby for the views

• Everything goes in one file
• File has modules for each MVC component
• Run camping

When should you use Camping instead of Rails?

• When Rails is too fat
• Right tool for the right job
• You ain’t gonna need it

Controllers in Camping

• Classes define actions instead of methods in Rails
• Methods within those classes handle HTTP method types (GET, POST, etc.)
• Routes baked into action definitions

Camping Views

• Markaby is “Markup in Ruby”
• No more ERb!
• Methods define tags
• Will complain about invalid HTML
• Blocks build tag heirarchy
• Attributes as a hash

Models in Camping

• Simply ActiveRecord models
• Defaults to SQLite
• You can also use migrations
  • No down migrations, but you can script that
• Can use acts_as_versioned and other AR-specific plugins

Deployment

• Much easier than in Rails
• Don’t use Camping server (just like we don’t use Webrick)
• Can be deployed in a variety of environments
  • Mongrel!

What if my application gets big?

• Possible to split a Camping app into multiple files (use require)
• At that point, you should probably use Rails

Databases

• Camping defaults to SQLite
• But supports other RDBMS options

Sessions

• Camping has support
• Include a module, it acts like Rails

Testing

• Use Mosquito for bug-free Camping
• Not in the default package, but still available

Form helpers

• Gregory Brown wrote a snippet to get form helper support in Camping
• Can use form_for syntax

Serving static files

• Does not work like Rails
• Static files can be embedded in a Camping application
• They can be read from disk using File.read (better)
• Have the web server do it (best)

Before/after filters

• Override the service method and put logic before and after it
• Not as flexible as Rails’ filter DSL

Decamper

• Converts Camping application to Rails applications
• Status is unknown

Kindling

• Library I started to pull top 5-10 “Railsisims” in Camping
  • before/after filters
  • file upload
  • etc.

Q & A

• Q: Is it possible to use something other than Markaby with Camping like XMLBuilder? (from Jay Phillips)
• A: Yes. Extend my ERb templating code to use Builder or something else. The code is simple.

• Q: Can you exaplain the syntax for inheriting a class from R?
• A: Uses regular expression to do routing. You have to use your own.