Hey everyone! It has been a while since my last blog post and I’ve missed you! ;P . Today’s post is about Sinatra and my new web app built on the framework. Although it pales in comparison to Rails, this was my first experience with a relatively large framework in Ruby. Learning the conventions and DSL of Sinatra was fun and it makes me look forward to working more with Rails!
Click here to watch a walkthrough of my “Star Citizen Hangars” Sinatra App!
If you watch the video above, you’ll see that the current iteration of this project is pretty simple. You can browse a market of available ships (taken straight from the Star Citizen Universe.. click here to learn more about the game!) and claim any of them as your own. Any ships you own will be listed in your hangar (which also functions as your profile page) and you can even list a new ship of your own on the site. The long term goal is for this app to be a hub for peer-to-peer ship trading while the game is in development. This type of trading is already done on other websites, like Reddit, but I have yet to see an app that gives these transactions a well polished experience.
Even though there was a lot of “grunt” work to get the app up an running, Sinatra is a competent enough framework that it made the process pretty easy. It allowed my to focus more of my time on iterating through different HTML and CSS styles. The idea that Ruby on Rails is going to eliminate most of the busy work that was required to get a Sinatra app running is a very exciting prospect. That being said, I’m glad I had the experience working with a simple framework like Sinatra because it really helped me understand what makes a bigger framework work so well.
I appreciate ANY and ALL feedback. Please feel free to leave comments on my Youtube videos. I look forward to meeting you!