# Re: Modular Ruby **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 9, 2006, 9:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-modular-ruby/78907 "2006-03-09T09:28:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![PeSSSSaS\_Botp](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ecd19e/32.png) [@PeSSSSaS\_Botp](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeSSSSaS_Botp)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 9:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-modular-ruby/78907/1 "2006-03-09T09:28:25Z")
Julian I. Kamil [[mailto:removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)] : #It’s not done, yet, but when it does, it will allow “client side” Ruby #programming through a browser using an object-oriented application #framework. The Pandora wiki engine is pretty solid, and you can can you enlighten us on this, pls? #Best regards, #Julian I. Kamil [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![PeSSSSaS\_Botp](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ecd19e/32.png) [@PeSSSSaS\_Botp](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeSSSSaS_Botp)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 2:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-modular-ruby/78907/2 "2006-03-09T14:38:52Z")
My plan is the following… First some concepts… Pandora is a wiki engine that allows the creation of a collection of web pages that I call ‘books’, and different access levels to different users. A Publisher is allowed to create new books, an Author is allowed to create new pages in an existing book, and an Editor is allowed to edit / modify existing pages of a book. A viewer may be authenticated or not, and may be able to see some of the contents that have not been marked private by the publisher or authors of the book. You can see how this works and play with the system by downloading the current beta version at: [http://pandora.rubyveil.com/pandora/Pandora/Project/Downloads](http://pandora.rubyveil.com/pandora/Pandora/Project/Downloads) A page in a Pandora book contains plain text with Textile or Silk Veil markups. Silk Veil is an extension of RedCloth that adds markups that allow references to resources within a Pandora book in addition to other things. A page in a Pandora book can be marked ‘scriptable’ by its publisher or authors, which means that it can contain Ruby code enclosed in ‘\<%’ and ‘%\>’ that can call Pandora’s Box document-oriented API and other standard Ruby API. This will let the authors to manipulate the enclosing document easily, such as inserting Javascript code that can call Prototype library through a Ruby wrapper, for example, to add AJAX behaviors to the page, and other things like collecting form data, processing the input from the page viewer, and entering it to a backend database, for another example. When processing scriptable pages, Pandora will take one extra step after interpreting the Textile and Silk Veil markups to run the resulting text through ERB in the context of a restricted sandbox to produce the final page, either in the same Ruby process as Pandora, or in a separate, forked child. The result is a system that will allow its users to write ‘document-oriented’ applications in Ruby using no more than a browser and without needing shell access to the server where the code will be executed. Because this will give document authors and editors tremendous power, I have to be careful in executing the embedded Ruby code not to pose a security risk, which is rather hard to do… 😉 But, if I’m able to do this correctly, we will have a cool way to do dynamic page programming on the “client side” without resorting to browser-specific dialects of Javascript. I am very optimistic about this possibility, but as I’ve said earlier, the challenge is in the design of the API and the implementation of the sandbox to avoid creating a security hole. So that’s the plan. The Pandora wiki / document publishing platform is relatively complete, as you can see in the web site. Comments and suggestions on how to implement the rest are absolutely welcome, as well as participations if you have some extra cycles to help code parts of the system… 😉 Best regards, Julian I. Kamil [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) [http://pandora.rubyveil.com/](http://pandora.rubyveil.com/) - Document publishing and web application framework [http://books.rubyveil.com/](http://books.rubyveil.com/) - The Ruby Bookshelf