[janko-m]

I was actually contributing actively to Refile before, so in a lot of ways Shrine is similar to Refile (the idea of backends is basically the same). However, the main difference is that Refile does processing on-the-fly, while Shrine (and CarrierWave) do it upfront, so it goes in that direction. Basically in Shrine I added all of the features I was missing and wanted to change, which I wasn't able to add to Refile in a compatible way. One major addition is the support for background jobs, which I just couldn't see how it could be added to Refile. Also, I wanted Shrine to be far less opinionated than Refile, that you can have much more options how to do uploads.

[jrochkind1]

Can you explain what you mean by "upfront" vs "on-the-fly"? I'm somehow not getting it.

This looks very nice. It'll need lots of docs with examples to understand how to put together the nicely flexible building blocks you provide.

[janko-m]

"Upfront" processing means that you're doing the processing during upload, and on the "on-the-fly" processing means that you first upload the file, and then it's processed dynamically through the URL. For example, in Refile you make an URL to the uploaded file like this:

/attachments/sdkd/resize/300/300

That will make Refile trigger the specified processing at the moment the URL is requested. You should then put a CDN or a reverse proxy in front to kind of cache these processed files, so that they're not processed each time.

About the documentation, I wrote documentation for each of the plugins, and I linked them all on http://shrinerb.com. The plugin names should hopefully indicate what feature they accomplish, and since they're all individual, it's up to the user to choose what features they want (i.e. combination of plugins).