Comments on: Introducing Warp Drive for Rails

By: Rich Apodaca

Rich Apodaca — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:41:46 +0000

@Mark – great work – thanks! I’ve been able to get Warp Drive to work on a blogging engine I’m creating. Everything seems to work except for Authlogic/OpenID authentication.

I’ve written a summary of my problem here (with links to example code and complete error messages):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1986851/authlogic-openid-authentication-fails-using-warp-drive

Any ideas on where this is going wrong?

By: Mark Bates

Mark Bates — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:02:08 +0000

Hey Evan, sorry you had such a problem with it. We’ve been using in it in production on several really complex projects with no problem. There are actually quite a few specs, but they’re not where you think they would be. Because of what it is doing the best way to test it is with two applications. If you look at that test_apps folder in the project you will see two Rails apps, Enterprise and Voyager. You install the Enterprise app as a WarpDrive and then run the specs from the Voyager app. That tests that the everything is doing what it is supposed to be doing. I agree more documentation could be useful, but since it’s really not doing much, there’s not a whole lot more to document. What problems were you running into exactly? I’d love to help resolve them.

By: Evan Light

Evan Light — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:43:00 +0000

I love the idea; however, after a couple of hours pairing, we had a great deal of trouble to get a warp drive with a controller with a “hello, world” action to work within another Rails app. The lack of specs, lack of documentation beyond the README, and the relative complexity of the code make for an extremely steep learning curve.

I would strongly recommend more specs and examples.

By: Sam Smoot

Sam Smoot — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:02:58 +0000

You know, this is actually pretty similar to Harbor (our own OSS framework). We’ve had it in production for some time. The goal with it is a bit different than Rails. Burned enough by breaking changes in Rails/Merb we decided to do our own thing. Beyond that we wanted to override individual layouts, actions, views, partials, routes, assets, etc, picking and choosing what we wanted to pull in from gemmed, mounted apps like PortAuthority (http://github.com/wiecklabs/port_authority).

Some of our apps are mounting over a dozen individual applications to run as one client facing app.

bc.. run Harbor::Cascade.new(
ENV['ENVIRONMENT'],
services,
Newsroom, PortAuthority, UserManagement, ChannelManagement, SyndicationManagement,
ReleaseManagement, PhotoManagement, VideoManagement, AudioManagement,
AssetManagement, PageManagement, BasketManagement, BulletinManagement,
Cleat
)

Then we apply a layout, override a view here and there where necessary and in a few hours we’ve launched a pretty massive new application for a new client.

Harbor has been 1.0-ish for awhile. We just haven’t announced it since we’re still putting together our blog (http://wiecklabs.com) and all that jazz. Look at the commit history though, it’s a lot more mature than you might imagine for a framework you’ve never heard of before.

So yeah, the idea is basically that I hate writing the same thing a dozen times over the course of a year.

Anyways, lookin’ good Mark. This is more inline with what I was hoping Mack would eventually evolve into, so it’s neat to see you’re still innovating.

Of course, even neater would be to ditch Rails, but I understand.

By: grimen

grimen — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:35:48 +0000

@Mark Bates: Actually you can, try. This works for me:

http://github.com/grimen/delayed_job_mailer/blob/master/lib/delayed_job_mailer.rb

Gotta love Ruby!

By: Mark Bates

Mark Bates — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:21:46 +0000

@Oliver, honestly, I don’t know. Mountable apps are still a bit of ‘vaporware’, so it’s hard to tell. In the meantime, I needed this type of functionality, so I took matters into my own hands. Perhaps some of the WarpDrive, or it’s ideas, will make it into 3.0. I’ll be really disappointed if they cripple mountable apps like they did with engines.

By: Twitted by aberant

Twitted by aberant — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:11:19 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by aberant [...]

By: Dan PIckett

Dan PIckett — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:31:22 +0000

Thanks for open sourcing this! I definitely have a few projects where warp drive is a plausible solution.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:24:14 +0000

I like the idea! But I wonder how “Warp Drive” compares to “mountable apps” in Rails 3?

By: Mark Bates

Mark Bates — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:05:16 +0000

@Micah, here’s the github link, http://github.com/markbates/warp_drive sorry about that. In the example above the original UsersController is in the ‘authenticator’ WarpDrive. I didn’t put in all the steps to build the ‘authenticator’ app, because all you need to do is build a ‘standard’ Rails app. As far as the magic is concerned, there is definitely a lot of magic in there, I’m not going to lie to you. There is definitely some aliasing and reworking of some private Rails methods to get this to work. It would be nice if they had a public initialization api, that let you hook into all of the initialization steps, but alas, they don’t. Check out the project on GitHub, if you’re curious as to how I did it.