So the Sinatra guys just kicked out v0.9. Classy and well-dressed, as always. If you haven’t played around with Sinatra before, you should really give it a look. It’s often everything I need for building lightweight micro-apps. Very easy to learn and use, too.
Of course, Sinatra is intentionally quite small and doesn’t dictate what testing framework, ORM, or templating language you use. Having choices is great, but using a common set of tools with Sinatra can also cut down on initial configuration time and make it even more appealing for quick tasks.
Personally I’ve found that my own ideal application template consists of RSpec, Haml, DataMapper, and a few bits of well-placed glue. If you want to give Sinatra a spin, and just want some sensible defaults baked-in from the get-go, check out the application template that I pushed to GitHub earlier today. It should help get you up and running fast. And it might make pancakes for you too (but probably not).
Just fork the repository, rename it, and start writing specs and code. When you’re done, use the included Rackup script to deploy it via Passenger. Couldn’t be easier. If you have any criticisms, suggestions, or improvements, let me know. Or hey, just send a pull request.
Thanks to Ryan Tomayko, Blake Mizerany, and the rest of the Sinatra team for creating such a fun (and truly minimalist) web framework.