Announcing Lightrail: Lightweight Rails stack for HTML5/JS applications

There's been a lot of debate lately surrounding Rails suitability for the server stack underlying modern HTML5/JS applications. Having used Rails for some four years for this purpose, and worked with a number of Rails core members, this is a problem I think the Ruby community has solved wonderfully, but yet some are confused as to what solutions are available or the way forward.

Rails 3 provided enormous advances in terms of letting you specialize what Rails provides to the problem at hand. However, to a certain extent this goes against the Rails mantra of "convention over configuration". While Rails 3 provides ample opportunities for configuration, as Rubyists, we shouldn't have to configure anything, right?

I'm a huge believer in both Rails' suitability as a backend for modern client-heavy HTML5/JS applications, and someone experienced in building such applications. Rails is, was, and continues to be a game-changer for modern web development. ActionController::Metal provides the bare minimum needed to build apps which don't need the complete set of HTML-generating abstractions provided by ActionView, but need more tools than a more minimalistic framework like Sinatra makes available. Between Sinatra and Rails lies an unaddressed middle ground, one where, in theory, you should be able to build an ActionController::Metal stack appropriate to your needs, but maybe this is too daunting a task.

For you, the JSON API builder, who wants more than Sinatra but less than Rails... I have what you desire. Introducing Lightrail:

What is Lightrail? Lightrail is Strobe's ActionController::Metal stack for HTML5 applications, originally used to provide the backend APIs for Strobecorp.com and its frontend HTML5/JS application authored with SproutCore (which has been superseded by Ember.js).

Lightrail contains everything you need to build lightweight applications on the Rails stack which serve only JSON, and furthermore, contains an innovative system for building JSON APIs around your objects. Rather than adding a fat #to_json method on your models, or using a template to construct your JSON, Lightrail's allows you to map the JSON serializations of your objects to specific wrappers that know how to serialize specific objects. Like using #to_json, this makes it easy to recursively serialize nested objects to JSON without having to use ActionView voodoo like invoking other renderers. Besides that, it still separates the concerns of what your domain objects are and how they serialize to JSON. If you've tried to build JSON APIs in Rails and found the existing mechanisms for JSON serialization lacking, please try out Lightrail::Wrapper and let me know what you think.

Lightrail is something of an experiment. I didn't write it, but it's software I believe in so much I'd like to support it and see if people are interested in it. Rather than competing with Rails, Lightrail takes the latest, greatest Rails stack and reconfigures it for lightweight applications that provide a JSON API exclusively. Lightrails builds upon all of the modularity that Rails 3 brings to the table, and simply and easily delivers a lightweight stack which is still suitable for complex applications.

Please let me know if Lightrail seems like a good idea to you and if you'd like to help support it. As I have my hands in an awful lot of other open source projects, Lightrail isn't the sort of thing I can support full time. However, if you have some time to spare and ideas to contribute, I am definitely looking for people to help maintain and improve this project.

If you're interested in using Lightrail or helping out with its development, sign up for the mailing list. Just send any message to lightrail@librelist.com to join.