Xcake - Web Services with Sinatra and Heroku

Feb 10, 2011

On Feb 8, I gave a talk at the local Xcake monthly meetup at the Science Gallery in Dublin. These meetings are predominantly loaded with mobile developers, with a worthy smattering of other creative professionals. The talk was on Web services, and how easy it can be to lash something together to test your mobile application development. Many of the mobile dev shops interact with client data through a web service, and making your own local copy with test data can give you a speed advantage in getting your (client's) app to market. The talk uses Ruby, Sinatra and Heroku as the core tech behind a RESTafarian style of service, with persistence and a public deployment.

The good news is that neither the bucket of tar nor the sack of feathers was required by the audience, there was a distinct lack of torches/pitchforks, et cetera. As a result I've posted the slides on Slideshare. They are mostly composed of screengrabs and codedumps, so make sure you view the presenter notes, in which I have expanded on the sparsely populated slides themselves. You can get the sample code on GitHub. I'll buy beers for anyone who implements simple database authentication and sends me a successful pull request :)

Note: I've spotted some rendering weirdness with Chrome - if you can't see the slides, try another browser, or hit the download button.