Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web-applications in Ruby with minimal effort. Like Rails and Merb, Sinatra is not an MVC framework and basically follows a flat-file structure instead. The framework define conventions such as location of static files and views, bootstrap, dev/production/test environment variables, filters, helpers, TDD, and much more.  Read Getting Started for complete details. Even though Sinatra is not a MVC framework but sinatra-gen may be used to generate new Sinatra projects. GlassFish Gem can easily run Rails, Merb, Sinatra, and any other Ruby framework applications based upon Rack. TOTD #70 shows how to run Rails applications and TOTD #53 shows to run Merb applications. This TOTD will explain how to run a trivial Sinatra application. A later blog will describe how to plug a generic Rack-based framework.

Lets see how to get started with Sinatra using JRuby and GlassFish gem.

1. Install Sinatra gem as:
   
   

   ~/tools/jruby >./bin/jruby -S gem install sinatra JRuby limited openssl loaded. gem install jruby-openssl for full support. wiki.jruby.org/wiki/JRuby_Builtin_OpenSSL Successfully installed sinatra-0.9.1.1 1 gem installed Installing ri documentation for sinatra-0.9.1.1... Installing RDoc documentation for sinatra-0.9.1.1...

2. Create a directory "sinatra-sample", create a file "hello.rb" in that directory with the contents shown below:
   
   

   require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/hi' do   "Hello World!" end

3. Run your sample using GlassFish gem as:
   
   

   ~/tools/jruby/samples/sinatra-sample >../../bin/jruby -S glassfish Log file /Users/arungupta/tools/jruby-1.2.0/samples/sinatra-sample/log/development.log does not exist. Creating a new one... Starting GlassFish server at: 192.168.1.145:3000 in development environment... Writing log messages to: /Users/arungupta/tools/jruby-1.2.0/samples/sinatra-sample/log/development.log. Press Ctrl+C to stop.

   
   And then the output is available at "http://localhost:3000/hi" and looks like:
   
   

Neat and simple!

You'll hear all about it at Develop with Pleasure, Deploy with Fun: GlassFish and NetBeans for a Better Rails Experience at Rails Conf next week.

Here is the order in which I'll seek any help:

• Project Website
• IRC #sinatra
• Twitter
• Mailing List

The next blog will show how to create a Sinatra CRUD application and run it using GlassFish.

Please leave suggestions on other TOTD (Tip Of The Day) that you'd like to see. A complete archive of all the tips is available here.

Technorati: totd glassfish jruby sinatra