Announcing Ruby on Crack

After several months of keeping it under wraps, I’m happy to officially announce my own web framework to the world. It’s called Ruby on Crack and will be released by RailsConf 2008. The name of the framework was chosen because I wanted to push the idea of a complete break from the existing Ruby frameworks, a clear cut, if you will.

Rails is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s very opinionated. If you need to get things done in a different way, coding in Rails can become a burden. More reasonable from this viewpoint is Merb, but it’s still somewhat too close to Rails. Ruby on Crack is very different. A programmer using Crack no longer has strong opinions or is constrained within the rules defined by the framework. The only guiding principle is FUD (Fast Useful Development), but you get to decide your own specific style of web development. The framework is very modular and each component is connected to another one through a unified API called PIPE.

According to my preliminary tests, using Crack makes you 5 to 10 times more productive than using Rails. Not only that, but speed wise, you’re running much faster with Crack. Ruby on Crack ships with two extremely fast web servers, as opposed to WEBrick with Rails, called Purebred and Fat. Purebred handles requests by spawning new threads, while Fat uses an event based approach. From what I’ve seen so far, they easily outperform any other existing webservers, to the point that I was able to serve a sample app at a rate of 10,000 requests per second on commodity hardware.

Part of the speed boost that Crack can give you, is due the highly efficient, thread-safe and powerful ORM called Freebase. Even Datamapper is really slow compared to Freebase. On average, Freebase smokes ActiveRecord (it’s 4 to 5 times faster) and it can take advantage of advanced database features which are not supported in ActiveRecord, Datamapper, Og or Sequel.

I don’t want to reveal too much right now, but Ruby on Crack is truly a revolutionary approach to web development and makes you value the true power and colorful nature of Ruby. All of this will be explained in detail in future posts, and the code will be released into the wild for all to enjoy within the next couple of months. It took a lot of effort to get my team to work on Crack, but the results are rather satisfying. Don’t just take my word for it though, here are a few testimonials from prominent figures in the community who’ve had a chance to use the closed beta of Ruby on Crack:

“Those who use Crack can really appreciate the beauty of Ruby.” — Matz

“Fuck You” — DHH

“Incredible framework. I plan to publish a book about it ASAP, and I’m sure that it’ll be the first in a long series of books that I’ll write while using Crack.” — Dave Thomas

“Crack is what we really needed at Engine Yard.” — Ezra Zygmuntowicz

“Wow, what an eye opener. Crack made web programming fun again.” — Obie Fernandez

“You ass#$!@ m0#@#!@&%$” — Zed Shaw

“Once you have tried Crack for the first time, you realize how addictive it is. I simply can’t go back to Rails anymore.” — April Pesce

“Web 3.0 will belong to those on Crack.” — Tim O’Reilly

“If there is something that the Ruby community got right it’s Crack. I wish Python programmers were on Crack too!” — Guido van Rossum

“This is truly innovative and a godsend for startups. Give us about 6 years and we’ll have Arc on Crack too.”- Paul Graham

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34 Comments

  1. Giovanni Intini April 1, 2008
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  33. reddyonrails.com November 16, 2008
  34. Iain Wright November 24, 2008
  35. Pingback: [ANN] Ruby on Crack | keyongtech January 18, 2009

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