Bridgetown, the Hybrid Ruby Web Framework, Turns Five Today
Jared White
on Happy Birthday Bridgetown! Five years ago today, a project was born to create a new kind of web framework—certainly one unlike any previously seen in the Ruby community. (More on that in a moment.) I will confess, I’m as astonished as anyone we’re still going strong five years later!
This time last year I reminisced quite a bit and also looked forward to all-systems-go development of Bridgetown 2.0, and today we are preparing what might be the last beta of the 2.0 cycle before its final release.
But beyond a fist pump in the air and a dash of nostalgia, I’d like to reflect on the astonishing truth that Bridgetown is, well, still the only game in (our) town. I included in the title of this post “the Hybrid Ruby Web Framework” because that’s our not-so-secret sauce that for some reason continues to escape notice for a lot of people.
Bridgetown isn’t just a static site generator. Bridgetown isn’t just a dynamic application server. It’s both. And as time passes, the lines between those two worlds—pre-built and built-on-demand—will blur, and we’ll continue to press forward on solutions which allow your static pages to refresh portions of the page on-demand with live content. We’re super-thrilled with the amount of progress we’ve made on polishing our server architecture, as well as some companion projects simmering on the back burner to make interactive feature development feel unlike anything you’ve experienced in Ruby.
At the same time, we see Bridgetown as playing a significant role in elevating the exposure of Ruby web frameworks in general past a certain train-themed option some people think is the only Ruby framework available. There’s a lot of educational work to be done to show that Ruby has range and we can forge new paths. Along those lines, we want to show how Bridgetown can be used alongside other frameworks, most notably Hanami. While Bridgetown is itself a complete framework, there’s no reason you couldn’t use Hanami for your application server code and Bridgetown for a static portion such as a company blog. Could those live side-by-side in the same repo, perhaps even sharing some common assets? Stay tuned.
Anyway, back to work on getting v2.0 out the door. Once again, thank you to all who support this project and contribute to make it better. Excelsior!