LARubyConf 2009 - Blake Mizerany - "Sinatra: the Ultimate Rack Citizen"

I was very happy when the next presenter at the Los Angeles Ruby Conference 2009 (LARubyConf) was Blake Mizerany, creator of the very cool Ruby micro-framework Sinatra. As long-time readers of this blog know, I am very into Sinatra.

There has been an incredible amount of work going into Sinatra lately, so I was very interested to catch up on what the team has been up to.

What is Sinatra? A Ruby Domain Specific Language (DSL) Mapping REST to simple actions

Why?
- small
- fast
- great rack and ruby citizen
- strong focus on HTTP
- HTTP caching helpers built in before it was cool
- content negotiation
- no boilerplate
- dead simple config when the default are not enough
- smart configuration
- DOCS- sinatrarb.com
- extending is easy
- rack is the only dependency
- very low WTF to LOC ratio (jeremy mcnally's rubyfringe talk)

when?
- a few controllers models and views
- starting any web application
- you need reusable apps and/or middleware and/or resources
- you need speed

who?
- heroku
- github
- taps
- integrity

sinatra in your gems
- a mini-github for offline repo browsing
- a local plugin and play wiki
- memcached utilization graphs
- config reusable github hook

Example: NotTwitter

As classic Sinatra

set :username,
  Proc.new { fail "yo"}
  
get '/' do
  ...
end

Change

  require 'sinatra'

to

  require 'sinatra/base'

But I want to deploy to Passenger or Heroku! No problem.

./bin/install-not-twitter
Copy example config.ru to cwd
Copy .gems file

.ru is a standard Rack config file.

.gems is a Heruku configuaration file that will handle any needed Ruby gems installations

  git init && git add .
  git commit
  heroku craete
  git push heku  aster
  heroku 

3 Awesome Features in Sinatra
pass - I cannot handle this request, try the next route
forward - sinatra as middle ware... done my job, let the next app take over... pop in front of rails metal
use - Sinatra loves rack so much, we made sure not to hide it


Resources
http://sinatrarb.com
http://github.com/rack/rack
http://github.com/rack/rack-contrib
http://github.com/rtomayko/rack-cache

If you are doing everything with Rails, you are probably using too much for the job. Sinatra is simple, fast, and extensible. I am using it in two production applications right now, along with Rails. Sinatra handles parts of the application better than how Rails does, so that is how I roll.

Especially with the ever increasing momentum behind Rack, Sinatra is a good bet for getting things done. Combined with Rails Metal, and you really have it all.