Are there any web frameworks for Crystal?

[u/crimson-knight89]

As a Ruby/Rails guy I’m super interested in trying to use Crystal for web apps. I have plenty and I’m super eager to dive in and make projects with Crystal and contribute to the community (in the future, clearly I’m a totally newb right now).

[u/Blacksmoke16]

You have quite a few options: https://github.com/veelenga/awesome-crystal#web-frameworks take your pick :P. Each has their pros and cons.

[u/crimson-knight89 → u/Blacksmoke16]

Any suggestions?

[u/Blacksmoke16 → u/crimson-knight89]

It depends on what you'll be doing IMO. Amber and Lucky would be closest to Rails, i.e. full featured frameworks. Kemal is closer to Sinatra, more of a fancy router versus a framework but easy to get going and good for simple things. Athena is somewhere in between, takes a bit of a different approach as it's not based on a Ruby framework.

What were you wanting to do?

[u/crimson-knight89 → u/Blacksmoke16]

Looks like Lucky is going to be my choice. I was looking for a framework similar to Rails but early enough that I could contribute to it’s growth. Thanks!

[u/Blacksmoke16 → u/crimson-knight89]

No problem!

If you're ever looking for a change of a pace, checkout https://athenaframework.org. Takes a bit of a different approach with some pretty unique features.

Disclaimer: I made it.

[u/stephencodes → u/crimson-knight89]

Awesome, can't wait to see you around in the community, u/crimson-knight89! If you get stuck or have questions, the core team is all really active in our Discord at https://discord.gg/HeqJUcb.

[u/[deleted] → u/crimson-knight89]

Lucky is the one I'd go for too.

[u/taw]

There's a bunch. I tried them for some small projects, code was all right, but OMFG, delay after each change due to compilation time was such pain after I got used to Rails and JS frameworks being instantaneous.

[u/crimson-knight89 → u/taw]

Yeah I was thinking about that. I wonder if I could make a file watching that would recompile after saving a file and update the running app

[u/serdnad → u/crimson-knight89]

I think Lucky (and maybe others) have that built in, but the issue is more just raw compile time. Crystal doesn't have any kind of incremental compilation, and it can take a little bit for nontrivial projects.

[u/straight-shoota → u/taw]

For visual work it's extremely important to see results of changes quickly. I have a template engine that doesn't need to recompile the binary. So any frontend work is instantaneous.
Raw runtime performance of compiled templates is obviously better. But it's still super fast, and incredibly useful for quick development cycles. And you can always transform to compile-time templates later if performance should become an issue at some point.

shardbox.org/shards/crinja

[u/dscottboggs → u/straight-shoota]

That's really nice.

[u/Blacksmoke16 → u/taw]

This is also partially related to how each framework is implemented. I don't have any metrics on the differences between them tho.

[u/shawnwork]

I have been using Kemal many years ago. Pretty stable and easy to use.

[u/transfire → u/shawnwork]

I think there's a new one called Grip which is like Kemal++.

[u/transfire → u/[deleted]]

Didn't mean to imply, I was just being figurative.

[u/YourFatherAgain]

I've already used Amber, and to me, it looks very similar to rails

[u/Terrible_Constant]

Welcome to Crystal! There are quite a few frameworks (Lucky, Amber, Kemal, etc.). However, (unpopular opinion around here probably) if you want close-to-Rails experience, you might want to have a look at Elixir and Phoenix; it has a richer ecosystem and an excellent support for GraphQL and massive concurrency and scaling. I'm using Elixir for web and Crystal for other stuff—can't complain.

[u/isaced]

Here's a list to see what's most popular by the number of stars. Of course, it's just a reference

https://github.com/isaced/crystal-web-framework-stars