Rails is what I know. You could say that I grew up on it. Not grew up in the literal sense, but when the time came several years back for me to pick what web programming language I wanted to learn, I chose ruby on rails.
So here I am, several years later, making my way through life as a free-lance web developer and designer. Lately, most of the work that I have been doing is actually sub-contracted to me by other design firms.
The problem I have now is that rails is not suited at all for smaller jobs or quick set ups on someone else’s servers. I went through several setups before I ended up with my current configuration (nginx in front of a cluster of mongrels), and I can’t really make my self a pain by asking for special setups on someone else’s servers. I need to work too badly to do that.
The obvious choice for quick back-end programming jobs would be PHP, but I haven’t really had the time nor the inclination to learn a new language. I started shopping around for a smaller ruby framework. I looked at camping, but when I found that it uses activerecord, I decided against it. I wanted something that was a little more drop-in-and-go.
So I decided to create my own web framework for ruby called (tentatively) mira. It runs as a CGI script and the only requirement is ruby itself. No gems, no active[insert whatever here], no nothing except standard ruby libraries.
I am going to be releasing mira as an open-source project. So whoever wants it can download it, use it, fix it, or change it. I will be setting up another section of this site soon to go over all things mira. If you have any questions in the meantime, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you.
I should note that I have not used this little framework for anything else since it was created. It was fun to do, and I still like how it all looks when I go back to it. Nice and small and clean. —Mark