My second project for Flat Iron School was to build an app using the Sinatra framework. As stated on the Sinatra Homepage…. ”Sinatra is a DSL (Domain Specific Language) for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.”
Think of Sinatra as Rails’ little brother…….
Our main objective was to build a CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete) app with a MVC(Model-View-Controller) architecture that could show relationships between models.
Sinatra is a great way to get a simple app built and running. But that is not to say there are a few small things that may trip you up in production if you are new to Sinatra.
Bcrypt is a Ruby Gem that will encrypt a password within your databse. The main point you have to remember is to use password_digest in your tables when performing migrations.
Rack::MethodOverride is basically a hack to get patch requests through. If you forget to add this line to your config.ru then you may be into some frustrating debugging.
One gem that could make your build a lot easier is the Corneal gem. This gem will generate a file structure for you automatically with a few simple commands.
One of the best things I did was to plan out my project on paper. It took a lot of guess work out and things definitely went a lot smoother. Organization must become my new BFF.
For me personally I felt a bit less stress with this project then with the first project. Sinatra takes care of a lot of the logic behind the scenes so one can concentrate on how the app will work and look.
Overall it was a positive growth experience and I look forward to building even more with Sinatra.