Getting Started with Sinatra for Cocoa Programmers
Sinatra is the little brother to Ruby on Rails.
You’d think that a Cocoa guy like me — someone who’s quite happy working with a large application framework — would prefer Rails, but I find myself attracted to the smaller and lighter-weight Sinatra.
Sinatra and Node are very similar. But as awesome as Node is, it has one giant drawback: you have to write in JavaScript.
That’s also Node’s advantage. JavaScript is easy to learn and lots of people already know it. But while JavaScript, well, exists, Ruby is lovely.
Ruby has a whole lot in common with Objective-C. Both languages count Smalltalk as an ancestor: both are object-oriented and both use dynamic dispatch. I think you’d like it.
The rest of this post will get you up-and-running with Sinatra. Quickly. In like a minute.
(Yes, I know that many readers of this blog know Ruby and web services far better than I do. This is for the ones that don’t.)
Get Sinatra
In Terminal: sudo gem install sinatra
You already have Ruby, since it comes with OS X. gem is Ruby’s package manager. (Think CocoaPods, or think npm if you’re a Node developer.)
You’ll see some messages in Terminal as it downloads and installs Sinatra and its dependencies.
This tutorial will convert some Markdown text to HTML. There’s a gem for that too:
sudo gem install rdiscount
(Markdown? Discount? Got it.)
Create the Server
Create a folder on your desktop called CoolWebSite.
Inside that folder create CoolFile.markdown. Its contents should be simple:
\# It Worked!
This is a cool web page served by Sinatra
Then, also inside that folder, create CoolApp.rb.
Its contents are your actual Sinatra-based server.
The top two lines are the equivalent of import statements:
require 'sinatra'
require 'rdiscount'
Then we have Sinatra’s router, where you match http methods and paths to code. This example has just one route which matches a GET request to /.
The code matching that route does the following:
-
Read the contents of CoolFile.markdown.
-
Turn the Markdown text into HTML.
-
Add the HTML bits to the start and end of the HTML.
get "/" do
file = File.open("CoolFile.markdown", 'r')
file\_text = file.read
file.close
markdown\_text = RDiscount.new(file\_text).to\_html
page\_text = "<html><head><title>It Worked!</title><body>#{markdown_text}</body></html>"
end
You can see, I hope, that at this point you’re not that far from a blogging engine that reads Markdown files on disk and returns HTML.
Run the Server
In Terminal, navigate to your CoolWebSite folder. Type the following:
ruby CoolApp.rb
You’ll see that WEBrick starts up, and you’ll see a message like this:
== Sinatra/1.4.5 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from WEBrick
Now, in your browser, go to http://localhost:4567. You should see the It Worked! page, in glorious HTML. (You can view the page source to confirm.)
That’s it. Now you’re a web developer — and, what’s more, you have an easy-to-learn and lightweight framework plus a language that should feel very familiar. (No square brackets, but I’m confident you can get by without them.)