Open Source Technology

Open source beats at the heart of everything we do. Our million-dollar success story over years of web development is directly due to the advantages provided by the open source software ecosystem—particularly Ruby on Rails. Now, it’s our time to give back to this amazing community, starting with Bridgetown.

Bridgetown

A next-generation, progressive site generator & fullstack framework, powered by Ruby.

GitHubWebsite

It all started in the spring of 2020 as a fork of Jekyll, but since then—thanks to the wonderful enthusiasm and financial support of the open source community—Bridgetown has forged its own unique identity and evolved to offer unparalleled flexibility and innovation. Many developers, businesses, and publishers are now using Bridgetown to build new websites and online experiences (including this one!).

Whitefusion is “all in” for Bridgetown in 2022 and has big plans to make it not just a great Ruby (and Roda) framework by itself, but a central part of the Dreamstack to rival major competitors. We believe that—despite the claims of some—the future of website production is not React frontends, GraphQL calls, and serverless functions. But what is? WordPress?? 😋

This our chance as Rubyists to define the next ten years of building digital experiences and publications.

Serbea

Similar to ERB, Except Awesomer

GitHubWebsite

What if you combined the best ideas from “brace-style” template languages such as Liquid, Nunjucks, Twig, Jinja, Mustache, etc.—and applied them to the world of ERB? That’s Serbea. You can use Serbea in Rails applications, Bridgetown static sites, or pretty much any Ruby scenario you could imagine.

Use existing helpers as filters in expressions such as {{ "My Link" | sub: "Link", "Page" | link_to: route_path }}, use the “pipeline operator” in any Ruby code not just templates, add front matter to Rails app views, and so much more.

We’ve been developing and using Serbea in-house on production projects, and now it’s available to the open source world at large. We think Serbea will grow into a popular superset of ERB enjoyed by developers of Bridgetown and Rails sites alike.

Ruby2JS

An Extensible Ruby to Modern JavaScript Transpiler

GitHubWebsite

With Ruby fueling both SSG (Static Site Generation) and SSR (Server-Side Rendering), what about CSR (Client-Side Rendering)? Is it actually possible to write your frontend code (using Stimulus, web components, etc.) with Ruby too?

The Ruby2JS project aims to resolve that question. While it’s not a true drop-in Ruby runtime, it does enable the ability to utilize Ruby syntax and many familiar conventions to write code that will be transpiled 1:1 to JavaScript. Not only do you get the benefits that come with “thinking in Ruby” as you write frontend code, but the output JS files are so nicely formatted, they often appear as if they had been hand-coded!

Working source maps plus esbuild or Webpack integration completes the picture, providing a fantastic alternative to raw JS source. We’re very excited to have become regular contributors to this project and are already using it to build production-ready frontends moving forward.

In The Works…

As of Q3 2022, we’ve got a few more projects in the hopper as well—from new Roda plugins to a Bridgetown-based content paywall solution. In particular, we’re pretty excited about Lifeform, an object-oriented form builder which works in Bridgetown, Rails, and virtually any Ruby web framework which supports the render_in view convention. Stay tuned!

Yours?

Working on an open source Ruby project of your own? Need advice, mentorship, or additional development resources? Looking for support on any of the above projects?

We're Here to Help

Wondering how we put all these tools to good use for our website projects? Read our Methodology page to find out.

Fill in your email address, add a Toot-length project summary, and then we’ll quickly follow-up to schedule a free 30-minute consultation. Sound good?

Booyeah!