Lotus, a web framework for Ruby
I'm all for new frameworks that emphasize different ideas and philosophies. If nobody ever tried experimenting with a new approach, we wouldn't have Rails in the first place. So kudos to Luca and his fine work in developing Lotus. I like much of what I see.<p>That being said, I feel like YARWF (Yet Another Ruby Web Framework) is not the most pressing matter in the web space today, and I take exception to the notion that this is a complete web framework. It's not. A complete web framework has client-side components that facilitate two-way communication to/from the server, data binding, HTML5 history state-based page/view swapping, etc. In other words, the type of stuff being addressed by Angular, etc. At this point I wouldn't even characterize Rails itself as a "complete web framework"...it's proven itself to be incomplete and needs something more to be added to it for this kind of stuff.<p>What's the solution? Well, most people in the Ruby world do the typical route of a Ruby + Rails/whatever backend and a JS-based (or CoffeeScript-based) frontend. But I don't like it. I  want one language that works on both sides and in fact allows OOP code sharing between the two.<p>That's why I'm so bullish on Opal (<a href="http://opalrb.org" rel="nofollow">http://opalrb.org</a>) -- Ruby-to-JS compiler. It may not be perfect, but it's usable and it's here now. What we need is a framework built on top of Opal that is to the client what Rails, or Lotus, is to the server. Then I think we can safely say that we have a complete web framework solution for Ruby. Until then...not quite.