IronRuby with ASP.NET MVC

Now that ASP.NET MVC preview 4 is out, Phil Haack did as promised and made available a working prototype of IronRuby + ASP.NET MVC integration. He wrote:

Now that Preview 4 is out, I revisited the prototype and got it working again. I use the term working loosely here. Yeah, it works, but it is really rough around the edges.

To be able to use Ruby with ASP.NET MVC there has to be some c# glue/bridge code, especially in global.asax, which loads the routing tables (via extensions) and points at a specially made Ruby Controller Factory:

protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    RouteTable.Routes.LoadFromRuby();
    ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new RubyControllerFactory());
}

That glue code is placed in a c# library called IronRubyMvcLibrary, which also contains support for .rhtml view pages. The objects you need to use from within the view page is accessible through Ruby global variables - $model, $response, $html and so on.

As John and Phil points out, this is a prototype and a test to try out a few things with IronRuby and MVC, and I think it's cool. Much will change over time, like how they use instance variables on the controller to pass data to the view.

This is a step towards something which may become quite popular in the Ruby community, and perhaps to Rails people who has to, or wants to, write web apps on the .NET platform in the future. For those that hasn't been looking at IronRuby yet and want to have some fun with this - note that you don't have any intellisense or anything lika that in Visual Studio yet.