New feature release, Contrib and Recipes

We’re proud to announce two new releases today: 1.3.0 and 1.2.7. We’re also simultaneously releasing sinatra-contrib and would like to officially announce the recently launched Sinatra Recipes project. Read on for more goodness!

Sinatra 1.3.0

We have a new feature release!

From our perspective, one of the biggest additions is a streaming API. A simple version of it ships with Sinatra directly and is extended in sinatra-contrib. The vanilla version looks like this:

get '/' do stream do |out| out << "It's gonna be legen -

" sleep 0.5 out << " (wait for it)

" sleep 1 out << "- dary!

" end end

The cool thing about this is that it abstracts away the differences between all the different Rack servers, no matter if those are evented (like Thin, Rainbows! or Ebb) or sequential (like Unicorn, Passenger or Mongrel). Only WEBRick has issues with it at the moment (you’ll get the response body all at once), but we are looking into this.

What is really interesting about this: If you run on an evented server, like Thin, you can keep the connection open and easily implement messaging services, Server-Sent Events and so on:

set :server, :thin connections = [] get '/' do # keep stream open stream(:keep_open) { |out| connections << out } end post '/' do # write to all open streams connections.each { |out| out << params[:message] << "

" } "message sent" end

It is worth mentioning that all this works without fibers (which, amongst other things, would significantly limit the stack size).

We added support for the PATCH HTTP verb, which you might be familiar with from the new GitHub API:

patch '/' do # ... modify a resource ... end

A logger helper for logging is available now, and if it writes to the logs depends on whether you enabled or disabled logging:

configure(:test) { disable :logging } get '/' do logger.info "I just want to let you know: I'll take care of the request!" "Hello World!" end

The erubis method has been deprecated. Sinatra will automatically use Erubis for rendering ERB templates if available.

There is more coming with this release, but the rest is mainly bug fixes and improving the behavior. For instance, Sinatra treats ETags and Last-Modified headers properly when they are used as optimistic locking for unsafe HTTP verbs. For more changes, see the 1.3.0 change log.

Special thanks for helping with the 1.3.0 release go to:

Gabriel Andretta, michelc, burningTyger, Tim Felgentreff, Vasily Polovnyov, nashby, kenichi nakamura, Gaku Ueda, Gabriel Horner, Sylvain Desvé, Jacob Burkhart & Josh Lane, aibo (irc), Selman ULUG, Aviv Ben-Yosef, Paolo “Nusco” Perrotta, Marcos Toledo, Matthew Schinckel, Tim Preston, Davide D’Agostino, Simone Carletti, Peter Suschlik, Postmodern, F. Zhang, Rémy Coutable, and David Waite

Sinatra 1.2.7

We will drop support for Rack prior to 1.3 and Ruby 1.8.6 with the Sinatra 1.3.0 release. However, we will continue to supply Sinatra 1.2 with bug fixes until the End-Of-Life of Rack 1.2.x and Sinatra 1.2 will always remain compatible with the latest released 1.8.6 patchlevel.

For the backported patches, see the 1.2.7 change log.

We’d like to thank everyone helping with the 1.2.7 release:

Emanuele Vicentini, Takanori Ishikawa, David Kellum, Gaku Ueda, Lee Reilly, Iain Barnett, pete, Luke Jahnke, John Wolfe, Andrew Armenia, Tim Felgentreff, and Alessandro Dal Grande

Sinatra-Contrib

There are a lot of Sinatra extensions out there, and some of those are used by a large number of apps, like sinatra-content-for or sinatra-reloader. The maintainers of these extensions have to keep up with new Sinatra releases to make sure everything works fine. This poses an issue from time to time, especially since some of these extensions were relying on Sinatra internals. To fix this, we created the sinatra-contrib project (source code at https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra-contrib). This project contains a number of extensions that are probably useful for most Sinatra applications. Some are old extensions that have largely been rewritten to ensure the code quality developers are used to from Sinatra itself and to no longer rely on internals, like sinatra-namespace, and some are new additions of general interest, for example sinatra-respond-with.

Here is the promise: For every Sinatra release, starting with 1.3.0, there will always be a fully compatible sinatra-contrib release. Documentation for all the extensions shipping with sinatra-contrib will be made available on the Sinatra website. I would not have managed to take care of this all by my self, so I’m really grateful that Gabriel Andretta jumped in to help with this project.

Documentation is available at sinatrarb.com/contrib.

Sinatra Recipes

Zachary Scott recently launched the Recipes project. It contains community contributed recipes and techniques for Sinatra.