The second major release of the domain specific language for creating Ruby applications has been released. Sinatra is an alternative to Rails and other Ruby frameworks but with a different approach and is dependent on the Rack web server interface.

Sinatra is an open source project with an MIT licence. On its GitHub repo it claims to be:

Classy web-development dressed in a DSL

Named after musician Frank Sinatra (hence the hat logo) Sinatra was designed and developed by Blake Mizerany and was initially released in 2007 as a:

DSL (doman specific language) for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort

According to Konstantin Haase, Sinatra's lead developer and co-author of Sinatra Up and Running:

Sinatra serves as a lightweight wrapper around Rack middleware, with syntax that maps closely to functions exposed by HTTP verbs, which makes it ideal for web services and APIs. 

Although you may not be familiar with Sinatra it is a widely used and highly influential framework. Its prominent users include: GitHub, Apple, LinkedIn, the US National Security Agency, the UK Government Digital Service, BBC,  Engine Yard, Heroku and Songbird. As well as being cloned in the Ruby ecosystem, it is the inspiration behind Express for Node.js and Flask for Python.

Sinatra 2.0 is the first substantive release since Sinatra 1.4 in March 2013 and includes the following enhancements, among many more detailed in the chagelog.

• Server now provides -q flag for quiet mode, which disables start/stop messages 

• Session middleware can now be specified with :session_store setting

• Route params available during error handling 

• Ruby 2.3 frozen_string_literal feature enabled

More Information

Sinatra Website

Sinatra 2.0

Sinatra 2.0 Changelog

Related Articles

Seven Web Frameworks in Seven Weeks (book review) 

Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails (book review) 

Top 10 From Around The Web: Ruby On Rails Resources 

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