Looking forward to all the goodies in Padrino 1.0
August 26, 2014The other day while commuting to work I listened to the 170th episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast which hosted some of the creators and maintainers of the Ruby web framework Padrino. The first version of this site was built using Padrino and I really like the framework, but there has always been a few things that have kept me from using it for any production real life applications. I’ve started quite a few applications but I’ve always run into trouble with things like authentication, mounting apps, share layouts and of and on database disconnects.
All of the issues mentioned above is solvable and I even wrote a small gem that handles authentication based on Warden and it worked rather well, but I never had the energy to polish it and release as a gem or even just published the unfinished work on GitHub. These kind of “petty” problems just does not occur in for example Rails or Django, sure, Rails and Django has their issues as well, but not when it comes to the basics like this.
The good news is that the Padrino team is working hard on improving Padrino and have made several really good releases during the year which has improved Padrino a lot! It seems like they are aiming for a Padrino 1.0 release sometime at the end of next year and it will most likely contain all the things I miss a specific authentication module that will be be based on Warden. Other things worth mentioning is a new router system to make it faster and more robust.
All in all the Padrino team is doing a great job and there are a lot of exciting stuff both in the road map for v1.0 and in the milestone for v1.0 and there is absolutely a place for Padrino in the web community next to Rails and Sinatra which are the two other frameworks that are mentioned when it comes to using Ruby for web development.
The overall goal for Padrino seems to be “The faster Ruby framework” which most likely relates to pure performance speed but also just as important productivity. For example both Django and Rails are in comparison “slow” compared with Sinatra, Flask and Phalcon, but the productivity is much higher since the framework takes cares of so many things for you which should never be underestimated.
I’ll keep using Padrino and I’m confident that in one of the upcoming releases all the peices will fall in place for me to be able to use it in a real live application and I’ve already a project lined up for it. With that said inspiration just struck and I think it is time for a new Padrino project :)