My API Experiences with Ruby & Sinatra

A brief overview of why I chose Ruby and Sinatra to build some APIs, and what I learned along the way.

Transcript

1. My API Experiences with Ruby & Sinatra Wednesday, April 18, 12
2. My Motivations Building a web app for managing baseball teams and stats. Mobile, Tablet, 3rd party integration? StartupBus/Wastebits building a platform for the waste industry. Desire to learn more about APIs and distributed architectures. Wednesday, April 18, 12
3. My Tools Ruby 1.9.3 Sinatra DataMapper Test::Unit Wednesday, April 18, 12
4. Why Sinatra? It’s Rack based. It’s simple. It’s fast. I know Ruby. http://www.sinatrarb.com/ Wednesday, April 18, 12
5. Why DataMapper? One API for a variety of datastores. Less need for writing migrations. Data integrity is important. Lazy loading is built in. Wednesday, April 18, 12
6. Test::Unit Model tests. Routing/Integration tests. get, post, put, delete That’s it. Wednesday, April 18, 12
7. Example Sinatra App [See Terminal] Wednesday, April 18, 12
8. Example Route File [See Terminal] Wednesday, April 18, 12
9. Example DM Model [See Terminal] Wednesday, April 18, 12
10. Example Test Run [See Terminal] Wednesday, April 18, 12
11. Things I’ve Learned There’s a learning curve to working with API’s. Simple is better. HTTParty-on, Wayne. Rabl is a nice templating language. User/API authentication isn’t easy. Wednesday, April 18, 12
12. APIs: A Strategy Guide Wednesday, April 18, 12