Roadmap/Differences to Rails

[sol]

Hey,

I like Padrino pretty much so far, however I've got an important
question:

Is there something like a roadmap or general direction in which it is
heading?
Especially compared to rails, is it's goal to be another rails, or are
there clear
differences and you want to keep it simple and focus on a particular
scenario as a microframework.

Thanks in advance,
Christoph

[Nathan]

This is a really good question and it is always important to
understand where you are heading. The reason we built Padrino is that
Sinatra by nature is purposely constrained to be very limited in
scope. This is by design and the constraint is what allows Sinatra to
be universally accessible and useful for a wide variety of projects.

Sinatra will never grow much in scope because the developers behind it
rightfully feel that any additional scope added to Sinatra itself
would be a disservice. Instead, Sinatra is a perfect foundation to be
built onto by other projects that can add additional functionality and
grow the size and scope of what is possible during development.

This is where Padrino fits into the ecosystem. As one of the original
creators of 'sinatra_more' and 'padrino', I personally never intend
for Padrino to abandon the Sinatra roots. It is important to me that
Padrino simply build on the foundation provided by Sinatra. Part of
this means keeping the scope of Padrino constrained as well. When we
first started this project, I knew there were a set number of things I
wanted to add to Sinatra in an organic and natural way. This set has
always been roughly the same:

1) Admin Panel Functionality (ala Django)
2) User Authentication and Permissions
3) View Helpers and Form Builders for templates
4) Generators to give structure and integration with a variety of
components
5) Advanced routing, controller and alias functionality
6) Easy to use integrated mailer
7) Localization support baked-in
8) Caching (fragment, page, action) and adapters for cache storage

Beyond this there are some other niceties such as code reloading in
development, better logging, et al. Really Padrino in it's entirety
does do quite a bit to extend Sinatra's scope in almost every
direction towards more powerful application development.

However, as long as I am guiding development actively which I still
try to do and I think the entire core team would agree that we are not
looking to expand the constrained scope this project has. In other
words, those goals above are really the extent of what we want to
bring to the table and all other major functionality can be tacked on
as padrino extensions rather than into core.

Obviously there is still *a lot* of work to do and Padrino will
continue to grow. We need better tutorials, better documentation,
support for more components, bug fixes, better test coverage, et al.
This is the direction going forward.

Padrino is *not* looking be rails or yet another web framework.
Sinatra is a tested and proven development option and we plan to
continue our quest to make Sinatra development so flexible that it can
be used for the smallest one line app or an advanced e-commerce
consumer site without sacrificing what makes the development
experience so pleasant.

Long answer, hopefully that is helpful. I might put this up as a blog
post as well now that I think about it. Worth explaining our vision
going forward.

[sol]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for the detailed answer.

The reason of my concerns, of course, is that often with such projects
the direction and
especially the differences to existing frameworks, are not clearly
specified.

For a framework like this, its in my opinion very important to focus
on a set of
tasks, and stick to it. Otherwise, as many people want more and more,
it will end up
as a rails copy and die.

I'm looking forward to a roadmap or blog post about it!
And keep up your awesome work.

Cheers,
Christoph