Brut: A New Web Framework for Ruby

> I know, we can vibe away all the boilerplate required for Rails apps. But how much fun is that? How much do you enjoy setting up RSpec, again, in your new Rails app? How tired are you of changing the “front end solution” every few years? And aren’t you just tired of debating where your business logic goes or if it’s OK to use HTTP DELETE (tunneled over a _method param in a POST) to archive a widget?

For your personal hobby project, go nuts. Break all the rules and cowboy all your own conventions.

But for business applications, the conventions Rails enforces at least make codebases somewhat familiar if you've seen a Rails codebase before.

At a certain codebase size, boilerplate is almost unavoidable. Unpleasant, but necessary. Personally, I'd rather have some conventions, rules, and guardrails for where the boilerplate lives rather than trying to navigate your homegrown pile of code. Good luck maintaining that spaghetti when you've got multiple developers.

It's not clear how this new web framework avoids boilerplate anyway, so I don't see how this is an improvement over Rails. Presumably you'll still need to set up lots of stuff yourself, like RSpec. If the framework sets all of that stuff up for you in a conventional way, then you're just back to square one as soon as you need to fight against the framework's conventions.

Author here. The framework does require setting stuff up. RSpec is not one of those things. It's the testing library you will use if you use this framework. I didn't create a lot of flexibility in the framework. For example, if you don't like RSpec, you will not like this framework :)

You may want to examine the docs more closely. There are plenty of conventions and very few that can be circumvented.

But day one of a new framework is not going to compete with Rails. Sorry!

To be honest, I love this framework (so far from what I've seen) but I do hate the choice of RSpec. I say this as someone who used RSpec for like a decade after it was first released. I "get" it. I have contributed code to it.

Minitest (which is bundled with Ruby these days) is Good Enough™. It doesn't require you to learn a new DSL. Everything is just Plain Old Ruby. The use of RSpec these days—IMO—is just cargo-culting forward what was the right decision from 10+ years ago. Having an pseudo-English style interface for testing isn't worth having the additional dependencies nor the mental overhead of needing to know how the RSpec syntax is actually mapped into Ruby concepts.

I'm not asking you to change it, you're welcome to have a different opinion than mine. But I am curious if you have strong reasons for requiring it. Particularly because MiniTest seems to be well-aligned with the rest of your design philosophies, unlike RSpec.

I thought hard about this decision. Every time I use MiniTest, I end up wanting a bit more that RSpec has and then switching to it. I also have been surprised over the years that the `expect(x).to eq(y)` seems to be relatively intuitive to people, despite the fact that it doesn't seem like it ought to be.

Do you mind elaborating on what more you end up wishing you had?

Most of the additional features RSpec adds seem worthwhile but just end up being more complicated/confusing in the end, in my experience. Shared contexts/examples, for example. Others like let blocks should… just be methods.

I will say the change in… I think it was RSpec 3(?) to the expect(x) syntax was a hugely positive change, particularly in not having to monkeypatch the world.

The biggest thing is the mocking system. MiniTest's feels so difficult to use.

I also like creating custom matchers vs. creating my own assert_* methods.

I would agree that many features of RSpec are, honestly, bad: shared examples, shared contexts, etc. Excessive use of let! and let, plus the predicate matchers are all just really confusing to me.

I actually thought about patching the RSpec gem to remove the features I didn't like :) Might still consider it heh