Robot Has No Heart

Xavier Shay blogs here

A robot that does not have a heart

Sinatra deserves an encore

I’m putting together a small site for a dancing troupe I’m involved with. Index page, bio pages, that’s about it. I want basic templating so I can keep my HTML dry. Initially I tried rolling my own solution with ERB and rake to generate HTML, but that was shit, so I found Sinatra and found that a much tastier. It’s kind of like camping but without all the weird meta-fu. Also, it has a sweet name and sweet copy:

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$ ruby app.rb 
== Sinatra has taken the stage on port 4567!
GET / | Status: 200 | Params: {:format=>"html"}
== Sinatra has ended his set (crowd applauds)

My app, sans views and data (use your imagination):

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['sinatra', 'yaml'].each {|x| require x }

# This complex bit just loads up a YAML file and indexes an array of hashes
# by their name. Also, it symbolizes keys because strings are for losers
symbolize_keys = lambda {|a,v| a.update(v[0].intern => v[1]) }
Data = YAML.load(File.open('data/performers.yml')).inject({}) {|a, v| a.update(v["name"].downcase => v.inject({}, &symbolize_keys))}

layout do
  File.open('views/main.erb').read
end

helpers do
  def dancer
    data = Data[params[:id].downcase]
    data[:bio] = erb(:"dancers/#{params[:id]}")
    data
  end
end

get '/' do
  erb :index
end

get '/dancers/:id' do
  if dancer
    erb :dancer
  else
    status(404)
  end
end

static '/static', 'static'

When I need to deploy to some cheap-cheap-we-support-nothing host I can just spider wget the whole site and FTP it up. For the complete integrated coding experience may I recommend Mr. Sinatra live with The Count Basie Band.

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