It has been five months now since the original release of Waves. We’ve come a long way and there are some really exciting things still to come. So it seemed like a good time to review the original roadmap.

Waves is an open source framework for building web applications in Ruby, built from a smashing combination of mapping lambdas for request routing and just-in-time resources for request processing. Waves doesn’t care which ORM, template renderer, or Rack handler you use. Waves is thread-safe when you want it to be.

Good news! I’ve been selected to speak at the LoneStar RubyConf in Austin, TX, September 4-6, 2008 on Resource-oriented Web apps using Waves. This will be perfect timing as we expect to have our entire Resource-driven, Layers-based goodness ready for show (also known as the Turtles All The Way Down release). Hope to see you there!

As many of you may already know, YPC is one of the largest (if not the largest) Ruby / Rails deployments in the world. YPC SRD is thus one of the few places where you can work with Ruby on innovative and exciting projects. We are also hiring, so if this sounds interesting, and you’d like to be able to work with technologies like Waves, hit me up.

We’ve joined the cool kids and gone all git, so if you’ve been using the SVN repo, stop, drop, and roll. If you have questions about how to use Git or transition from SVN to Git, please stop by the forum, and we’ll do our best to help!

Well, that happened. On consecutive days, Waves was featured on two popular Ruby blogs, InfoQ and Peter Cooper’s RubyInside. It was fantastic exposure and a great way to cap of Waves’ first month since it’s public launch.

One of the things I always found myself doing in Rails was refactoring my models and controllers so that I could create new ones by simply inheriting from an appropriate base class and then maybe add a few tweaks and be finished. I typically ended up with three or four base classes representing different types of resources. For example, I might have one for administrative-related controllers, another for content-delivery related controllers, and so on.

I am probably way more excited about this than I should be, but I don’t care. Matz has a blog entry about Waves!

I got into a bit of discussion about the concept of request mappings on the mailing list, so I thought I’d recap that here as my first attempt to look at the nuts and bolts of Waves. Request mappings are akin to routes in Rails or Merb. But there are some profound differences. Request mappings are exactly that – they map a request to a block of code.

It’s taken a bit longer than I’d hoped, but Waves is finally at beta status, ready to find its way out in the world.

The last alpha release, last chance for feedback before the public beta release.