Sinatra vs Rails

When first getting into Ruby, I thought Rails was coolest thing since dynamic variables. It was pure magic. Using a complicated mix of meta-programming and Ruby Ninjaing in the background, Rails allows the average developer to do really complex things with only a few commands. And that was awesome.

Today though, as much magic as Rails gives you, I feel that it really restricts your ability to be expressive in your design. For example, when writing this blog, I used a technique where I duplicated each route. One route for AJAX calls, one for regular calls.

get '/posts/:m/:d/:y/:p' do |month, day, year, post|
  full_page get_post [month, day, year, post].join('-')
end

get '/ajax/posts/:m/:d/:y/:p' do |month, day, year, post|
  get_post [month, day, year, post].join('-')
end

This was really simple. get_post returns the html needed for a single post, and full_page wraps the HTML given to it in everything outside of the main div.

If I wanted I could have reduced the line count even further with some regex.

get %r{^\/(ajax\/)?posts\/(\d+)\/(\d+)\/(\d+)\/([^\/]+)$} do |ajax, month, year, day, post|
  post = get_post [month, day, year, post].join('-')
  ajax.empty? ? full_page post : post
end

Though for 2 extra lines, you get a lot more readability. BUT, the power it still there if you want to wield it.

If I wanted to do this in Rails, it wouldn’t nearly feel as fun and free spirited. I would have to create a couple controllers, break REST (which I don’t know if it is just me, but I feel guilty doing in a Rails app) create a Post model, fiddle around trying to serve AJAX content, and generally not have such a free experience.

_why is one of my all time heroes when it comes to programming. His opinion was that coding is much more of an art than a business. Sure its a lot safer to write unit tests, and have these standard sub-systems for everything, but what if we just want to express ourselves in our code? What if I don’t care about all the edge cases that could cause my code to blow up, I just want to take a journey to get someplace?

Rails seems like ponies and rainbows at first, but then you realize after a while its all just a business framework like any other. And you know, thats fine if I’m writing something for a client. I want that safety and structure. I want that sense of control over my application. But, I feel that as programmers, we forget that coding just for the feeling of creating something and leaving all of our “business think” back in the office, is a wonderful thing.

I would recommend to everyone to touch a file, require 'sinatra' and go wild. Create something, just because you can. And thats awesome.