Question

What advantages do I have with a Rack app over a sinatra app?

thanks

Answer 1

I think the asker wants the merits of keeping it to just Rack.

Considering Sinatra is already an extremely thin & minimalistic veneer for typical web applications, my short answer will be: when your needs are atypical and/or spartan

when you don’t even need…

• layout/ templating – you enjoy writing out raw string http content
• cookies and sessions – no memory, everything is one-shot default
• methods – your app abuses the URL and HTTP VERB in crazy ass ways
• to be modern – you have nostalgia with CGI/perl scripts in the 90s
• any structure – your app returns time of day in text. per se.

I use Sinatra because I believe this is the lowest footprint you can really focus on business function of my apps, without dealing with web server nitty-gritties (Rails conversely is monoli-thick!) and still have an intuitive MVC-like project structure

You gain really little except code lines, and a smarmy twinkle in your eye when impressing geeks
honest.

p.s.: I maintain a nice skeleton for my own needs at http://github.com/codepants/yasumi