Framework for non-web Ruby project

Question

I\'m looking for a simple Ruby framework for a non-web project. I\'m very familiar with Rails, so when I write pure Ruby I miss:

• The different env

Answer 1

Alright, that is somewhat of a three-part question. A threstion, or triesti... actually that doesn't work. Threstion it is then.

One thing to understand about Rails is that it isn't magical. It's code, written by mortal humans who have faults (such as oversized-egos) but who are also incredibly damn smart. Therefore, we can understand it after perhaps a little bit of studying their work.

1. Rails environments are lovely

The code behind the Rails environment management is actually quite simple. You have a default environment which is set to development by this line in railties/lib/rails/commands/server.rb. You could do much the same thing in your application. Run a bit of initialization code that defines YourAwesomeThing.environment = ENV["AWESOME_ENV"] || "development". Then it's a matter of requiring config/environments/#{YourAwesomeThing.environment}.rb where you need it. Then it's a matter of having configuration in those files that modify how your library works depending on the environment.

I couldn't find the line that does that in 3-1-stable (it's gone walkies), so here's one that I think does it in the 3-0-stable branch..

As for the lovely methods such as Rails.env.production?, they are provided by the ActiveSupport::StringInquirer class.

2. Rails console is the Second Coming

I think rails console is amazing. I don't want to create a new file just to manually test some code like I would have done back in the Black Days of PHP. I can jump into the console and try it out there and then type exit when I'm done. Amazing. I think Rails developers don't appreciate the console nearly enough.

Anyway, this is just an irb session that has the Rails environment loaded before it! I'll restate it again: Rails is not magical. If you typed irb and then inside that irb session typed require 'config/environment' you would get (at least as far as I am aware...) an identical thing to the Rails console!

This is due to the magic that goes on in the initialization part of Rails which is almost magic, but not and I've explained it in the Initialization Guide Which Will Be Finished And Updated For Rails 3.1 Real Soon I Promise Cross My Heart And Hope to Die If Only I Had The Time!

You could probably learn a lot by reading that text seemingly of a similar length to a book written by George R. R. Martin or Robert Jordan. I definitely learned a lot writing it!

3. The Others

This is where I falter. What other utilities do you need from Rake / Rails? It's all there, you just need to pick out the parts you need which is actually quite simple... but I can't tell you how to do that unless you go ahead and paint those targets.

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Anyway, this is the kind of question that is exciting for me to answer. Thanks for giving me that bit of entertainment :)

Edit

I just noticed the BONUS fourth question at the end of your question. What would be the point of versioning your project? Why not use a version control system such as Git to do this and just git tag versions as you see fit? I think that would make the most sense.