Question

I have developed few apps in Rails, and I needed to develop an API. I received the advise to build it in Sinatra, so I started looking into it.

It seemed quite nice, but it seems that a lot of things you get automated in Rails does not seem to exist in Sinatra. Specifically, I seem to have to write my resources from scratch. eg. The model itself, the migrations, and the REST routes.

I was wondering if there are any generators for Sinatra like the ones provided by Rails? Or should I simply use Rails if I want these kind of things automated?

Answer 1

Check out the sinatra-rest gem that can be used to handle RESTful routes. Quoted below for convenience:

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[sinatra-rest is] a set of templates to introduce RESTful routes into Sinatra. The only thing for you to do is to provide the views. Automatically works nicely for models based on ActiveRecord, DataMapper, or Stone.

For example, if your model’s class is called Person you only need to add this line:

rest Person

Which will add the following RESTful routes to your application. (Note the pluralization of Person to the /people/* routes.)

Verb    Route            Controller   View
GET     /people          index        /people/index.haml
GET     /people/new      new          /people/new.haml
POST    /people          create       → redirect to show
GET     /people/1        show         /people/show.haml
GET     /people/1/edit   edit         /people/edit.haml
PUT     /people/1        update       → redirect to show
DELETE  /people/1        destroy      → redirect to index