Writing erb in Rails, you’re probably used to escaping HTML like this:

<%=h article.author %>

DJ is a great Rails plugin for running a worker queue through your database. But it only works with Rails… or does it?

Wondering how to get the equivalent of script/console for your Sinatra app? Try:

$ irb -r my_sinatra_app.rb

To use ActiveRecord’s migrations with Sinatra (or other non-Rails project), add the following to your Rakefile:

Get Exceptional is a service similar to Hoptoad: a web service which your application can post exceptions to. Either of these is a big step up from that old standby, exceptionnotifier, which fills up your inbox with exception emails.

Sinatra 0.9 is out. Thanks to the leadership of Ryan Tomayko, and a very active group of hard-working community contributors, Sinatra is making the transition from a cool hacker’s toy and into a mature framework, ready for production use. Much of this release has to do with stability and maintainably (such as a deprecations system), as well as outreach like improved documentation and bug tracking. Expanded documentation is on the way, such as the Sinatra book. This is an exciting time for what will soon be the #2 most popular Ruby framework.

A few more chances for you to catch me in person:

• Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup, Sept 25 @ 7pm (this Thursday). My presentation is titled: Instant Rails Deployment to Heroku with Git. Heroku’s API and Git integration is our secret weapon, so I’m pleased to be giving a talk focused entirely on these tools.
• RubyConf 08, Nov 7 @ 1:15pm. Blake Mizerany and I will be presenting Lightweight Web Services with Sinatra and RestClient. Besides shamelessly pimping our respective open source projects, we’ll talk about why we think the future is all about small apps loosely coupled into a larger system.

I like models. They do the heavy lifting. They’re easy to spec. You can grab them at the console or from script/runner with ease.

A few months ago, I went in search of a way to build an extremely lightweight Ruby web app. Merb can be stripped down pretty far, but I wanted a true microframework. Ramaze and Camping were getting close, but didn’t quite fit my taste. Then I discovered Sinatra.