Sinatra, my new favorite prototype playground

About a week ago I was trying to get something ready for the first annual Evri Hack-a-thon, a concentrated 2 day affair where we focused on putting together cool apps with the new Evri API. The event was a blast, I for one rediscovered how fun writing code for code's sake really is.

I was implementing a 'music browser' mostly in javascript, and needed a proxy server to make calls out to those services that didn't have JSONP support.

slight digression here. JSONP is the coolest thing since sliced bread. I say that as someone who loves bread, even more so when it is sliced. The ability to retrieve data w/o a backend is so powerful I _almost_ understand why it's been seen as a Terrible, Horrible, No Good Hack. But not really, because it makes life as a developer so much easier.

I wanted to spend most of my time in the JavaScript, not futzing with the backend server. Because I've been mostly coding in Ruby for the last year, that ruled out rolling up a quick Java Servlet -- I didn't want to spend any time installing Tomcat/Jetty and associated jars, and having to remember how that world worked. I also didn't want to write a Rails app -- seemed ridiculous when I didn't have a data model.

I looked around at a couple of lightweight Ruby Frameworks, like Camping and Merb. Camping would have required me to down version to 1.8.5, and Merb overwhelmed me with the volume of configuration choices. In other words,my ideal proxy server had to be stone cold simple because I simply didn't have the time for anything else.

Enter Sinatra. Elegant, concise, and witty, just like it's namesake. Here is how you configure a path to /json/getjswidgets in Sinatra:

get "/json/getjswidgets" do
cb = params[:callback]
href = params[:href]
...
end

A couple of things to note in the example above:
(1) params are retrieved with the params hash, just like in Rails. So this method was actually called as:

/json.getjswidgets?callback={temp callback name}&href={some value}

(2) all paths are handled with the same 'get...do...end' syntax. It's that simple.

Another example:

get "/json/artists/:name/album" do
cb = params[:callback]
name = params[:name]
....
end

Note that the name parameter is embedded in the path, just like you do in the standard routes.rb file in rails.

Once you get past the path routing (which takes about as long as it does to read this sentence), Sinatra continues to be blissfully easy by allowing you to render the view via erb, builder, haml, and sass. You can render the view inline, or modularize it by putting the files in a view directory.

Helper methods are defined in a helpers block:

helpers do
def helper_method
...
end

...
end

Static assets are kept in a public directory -- again, Sinatra takes a "if it ain't broke..." approach that really minimizes the learning curve. Normally, I loathe the whole "But Ours Go To Eleven!" mindset that I see in frameworks because it means that I have to once again learn another unique set of concepts to get anything done. Sinatra does the exact opposite in leveraging a well known, well used, well understood set of conventions/concepts from Rails while stripping the concept of a framework down to that which is as simple as possible, but not simpler. Sinatra, you're my new BFF!