Or, a look at Corneal for Sinatra
The Flatiron Learn Web-Dev curriculum’s second module poses us, the students, with the challenge of creating a webapp that allows users CRUD powers (create, read, update, destroy) over some input of their own. This app is to be created in a Ruby DSL (Domain Specific Language) called, of all things, “Sinatra”
Sinatra purports to grant the ability to “[create] web applications in Ruby with minimal effort”, displaying on its home page a code snippet which, theoretically, composes a (tiny) website in and of itself:
require 'sinatra'
get '/frank-says' do
'Put this in your pipe & smoke it!'
end
And it’s true, ruby sinatra_app_name.rb will let you look at one line of HTML on your localhost.
But as we’ve learned recently in the course, there is quite a bit of busywork involved in setting up a small, standard site. There’s a config.ru file to be thought of for setting up Rack, Shotgun or Rerun to run the app with. There’s the whole model, view, controller system that a non-static website relies on, requiring sane directory structure and files for each. And there’s the spec for doing test-driven coding. It’s not exactly a mountain, but it is a pretty standard laundry list of code that, between projects, is not particularly DRY.
Enter the magic of Corneal. Just as Bundler can spit out a mostly-ready template for an offline gem file, so Corneal preps a Sinatra CRUD app with a simple:
corneal new APP-NAME
APP-NAME appears in the current directory, complete with gemfile, rakefile, config.ru, MVC folders, and even a basic spec. What more could you want?
But wait, there’s more! Enter:
corneal scaffold MODEL-NAME
And the desired model gains an empty class file and relevant views and relevant controller functions! Needless to say, this is an incredible tool for quickly creating a bunch of small web apps within Sinatra. What better way to fail fast?