It is accepted wisdom within the Ruby on Rails community that the best frameworks are ones that are extracted from existing applications. It worked for Rails. It is also how Wunderbar was developed.
Since I'm virtually inviting a comparison to Rails here, it makes sense to differentiate the target audiences for both frameworks. After all, I'm not only a big fan of Rails, I'm an author of a successful Book on the subject.
The competition for Wunderbar isn't Rails; it is command line applications.
Applications that make use of STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR, and ARGV.
Whereas it isn't uncommon for a Rails application to have dozens of controllers, each with dozens of views, and serving thousands of simultaneous users; a Wunderbar application typically has a few pages, and often only one.
It also isn't uncommon for a Wunderbar application to have only dozens of users, and often only one. In fact, most of the applications I have built using this framework are deployed using CGI.
So with all this said, why a new framework? The answer is simple: while I am
also a fan of the command line, there are many times where a HTML form is
easier to use than ARGV, and scrolling through a web page is easier than
scrolling through a Terminal window. Particularly if the data is formatted
or tabular.
Before continuing with the introduction, it makes sense to explore a few demo applications.
Let's start with hello world