November 2011
Intermediate to advanced
122 pages
2h 23m
English
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Chapter 1. Taking the Stage
To begin, let’s take a moment to address a specific question: “what exactly is Sinatra?” We’ll start with a somewhat broad, sweeping answer, and spend the remainder of our time together drilling down into the finer details.
Sinatra is a domain-specific language for building websites, web services, and web applications in Ruby. It emphasizes a minimalistic approach to development, offering only what is essential to handle HTTP requests and deliver responses to clients.
Note
At a high-level, a domain-specific language is one that is dedicated to solving a particular type of problem. For example, SQL (structured query language) is designed to facilitate interaction with relational database systems. By contrast, a general-purpose language such as Ruby can be used to write code in many different domains.
This is a somewhat simplified view of things; if you’re interested in delving deeper into the landscape of DSLs consider Martin Fowler’s excellent “Domain-Specific Languages” (Addison-Wesley).
Written in less than 2,000 lines of Ruby, Sinatra’s syntax (while expressive) is simple and straightforward. If you’re looking to rapidly assemble an API, build a site with minimal fuss and setup, or create a Ruby-based web service, then Sinatra has quite a bit to offer. As we’ll see later, Sinatra applications can also be embedded into other Ruby web applications, packaged as a gem for wider distribution, and so on.
In this chapter, our goal is to get off the ground as quickly ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.