Rack::Flasher

Flash mashed for Rack using bits of Rack-Flash and Sinatra-Flash, and the melted butter of my mind.

Why?

Because I want to use a Rack flash, but the current Rack Flash library is difficult to use and the source makes no sense to me. Sinatra Flash has a nice implementation for the flash hash, it's easy to follow, all it needs is conversion to Rack middleware.

Also…

If you're reading this it's because you want to choose a flash library, and you're wondering "why this one?". Here's what I don't like about the others:

• Rack-Flash sometimes doesn't work for me.
• The "hash" it uses doesn't implement each, which makes it more difficult for others to use.
• Sinatra-Flash is great, as long as you only want to use it in a single application.
• All the flashes I've seen assign to the flash using something like flash[:key] = "value", which doesn't make sense across apps - what happens when you want 2 different apps to add an :error to the flash?
• They always emphasise ease of access over ease of assignment. When you think about it, you're more likely to program accessing the flash once into a helper, but the need to write to the flash will be fairly ad hoc throughout an application, so it would be better to have it the other way round and make writing code to write to the flash easier.

Some nice things about the others:

• Sinatra Flash has a nice helper method.
• It also uses some nice language in the library that helps make sense when you read it, now, next, styled_flash, keep etc.
• The Rack one works across applications (as long as you don't clobber the current values).
• The Rack one also allows you to set up several hashes, so you can have one per app, for example.

So, the philosophy leading to the implementation here is…

• It's Rack based, so it will work across apps.
• All apps can access any flash, but you can also have several flashes concurrently, so an app can have its own flash.
• Assignment is done via flash[:key] << "value", so that existing values aren't clobbered and so you can re-use a key multiple times.
• The flash is implemented so that writing to it is easier to code against, reading is more fiddly because it will be a one-off job (if that, see next point!).
• It gives a Sinatra helper for rendering the flash.
• A lot of the straightforward language of the Sinatra-Flash library has been kept.
• The flash hash implements enumerable (in fact, it delegates to an underlying hash, but that will become clearer as you delve into the docs).

Usage

TODO: Write usage instructions here

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request