Monday, April 12, 2010

Put on Your Hat and Dance to Sinatra


It's been almost two weeks since we had our kick-off/planning meeting. We ended up with screen shots - very vague, drawn on a white board - and some stories in Pivotal Tracker. I immediately started to look for css templates. I am not a designer, but I do like simple and clean design. Ended up picking one from http://www.freecsstemplates.org/.

My goal was not to jump into code and create models, database tables and such. I'd like to have a rough HTML prototype that can help us figuring out what we really need. I emphasize HTML, because I want to be able to change it easily. I don't want to have a migration script created when we need to add one more field to a form.

I started out with an index and the user signup page. When I added the confirmation page I quickly realized that I'll have serious duplication unless I do something about it. My header and footer html content was repeated in three HTML files. I know this is only a prototype helping us discovering how our web app should work. But still. Even my prototype code should be DRY-ed up. I badly needed a template solution.

I could have created a skeleton Rails app, but that just seemed too heavy for this purpose.

I remember Matt Otto's (@matthewotto) tweet from late March:


I saw the tweet, I did not really pay attention to it then. But after I created my thrid page and noticed the duplication, I knew I had to find something. I can't recall why I looked at Sinatra a couple of days later, but I was blown away. It is exactly what I needed! I put a simple app together with it and I was convinced: I found my template engine for the prototype!

Here is the only Ruby file I had in my sample app:

# myapp.rb
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
  'Hello, World!'
end

get '/hello/:name' do
  # matches "GET /hello/foo" and "GET /hello/bar"
  # params[:name] is 'foo' or 'bar'
  "Hello #{params[:name]}!"
end

get '/test' do
  @data = 'Hello from test!'
  erb :index
end

The first block is executed when you make a request - assuming you run the app locally - to http://localhost:4567. There is no template rendering, you'll only see the string "Hello, World!" in the browser.
Ok, this works, but how could I use this for my templates? 

Digging into the Sinatra documentation I found the solution. I had to create the following directory structure:

-|
-|-views
        |- index.erb
        |- layout.erb
-|-myapp.rb

layout.erb is my template:

<html>
<head>
<title>Something Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
<%= yield %>
</div>
<div id="footer">
<hr/>
</div>
</body>
</html>

And index.erb provides the page content:

<div>
This is the content: <%= @data %>
</div>

Please note that I set the @data variable in the "get '/test'" block.

And that's it. I tell Sinatra to grab the index.erb file and since I have layout.erb it knows it has to render that as a template. There is a whole lot more to Sinatra than this of course. I found the "Sinatra Book" really helpful. I'd recommend taking a look at it if you want to give Sinatra a try.

I used HTML in ERB first, but then Matt Otto tweeted that he went with (HAML) so I started playing with that.
HAML looked cryptic, but once you get the hang of it, it's really simple.

In the end, I started using HAML and SASS for my prototypes, I'll blog about them in my follow-up blog post.