I have been in a relationship with Ruby on Rails for more than 3 years, and I’ve completely dedicated and faithful to the beautiful web framework for almost 2 years. Until now.

Today I decided to cheat on Rails. And I’m not talking going back to the ugly ex, ASP.NET, or getting back in touch with old flirts such as PHP or Java, no … Once you go Ruby, you don’t go back.

But there are other Ruby web frameworks than Rails. “What? I thougth Ruby was invented for Rails, as a kind of unintentional side effect?” you might say, but it is no so. Until recentl, Merb has probably been the most well-known “Ruby-based framework that is not Rails”, but now the two are getting hitched and as such we have to look elsewhere for alternative Ruby frameworks.

Webby is one such framework. Or to be fair, Webby is so much less than both Rails and Merb, and that’s the whole point. Webby are for simple, static home pages that can be hosted on anywhere. The Ruby framework generates static html files based on layouts and content pieces defined in the project. It doesn’t use a database, it doesn’t parse forms and that is exactly the simplicity you sometimes need.

The two greatest benefits in Webby is:

  1. Content is plain text files and can be put in source control painlessly
  2. Output is plain html files and be deployed anywhere with just FTP, RSync or SSH

As I see it, this makes Webby the perfect “un-CMS” for a web site maintained by developers. We don’t want to type in long texts in textareas in the browser – we want to do it Textmate or whatever our favorite text editor is called. We want full control over the HTML, we want speed and we want real versioning for our content.

Some times Rails is just plain overkill.

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