Sinatra and Heroku: the elevator pitch

Recently, I needed to upgrade an old ASP.NET 2.0 site I’ve maintained for a family member.  I built the original site back in 2000 or so with ASP and FrontPage (had the FrontPage Bible on my desk for that one).  I later upgraded the site in 2005 to ASP.NET 2.0 with semantic HTML, XHTML and all that goodness.

But I had been reticent to touch it for the smallest requested change.  Not because the change was difficult, but because it was so difficult to deploy an ASP.NET 2.0 application.  Sure, there’s some web deployment project or something, but it was still annoying synchronizing production with development.

So I set about finding something better.  I didn’t need anything in ASP.NET, as this was simply a brochure site.  I needed to be able to upload content, theme and style it, and most importantly, control HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Choosing Heroku

I had heard about Heroku a while back, but hadn’t given it much thought as I wasn’t building any web sites.  I wanted to solve my deployment problems by simplifying deployment as much as possible.

Heroku is a cloud platform for hosting Ruby applications.  What’s fantastic with Heroku is the insane simplicity of every interaction.  It’s got a fantastic website, but the really interesting piece is that to deploy, you simply do a “git push”:

$ git push heroku master

There are no deployments, there is simply a push of my local git repository up to my Heroku repository.  One way to handle deployments is to put a bunch of tooling support in.  Or, another way is to remove the need to care about deployments and I just push my entire site up.

The coolest thing about Heroku is the entire platform has embraced “the Ruby way”.  If you need a specific plugin, it’s just gem packages.  Rake is available for database migrations, and Rack-based web frameworks are supported (including Sinatra).

Heroku is like many other cloud-based services like github, where the basic features are free, and add-ons cost extra.  Looking at my requirements, I didn’t need any addons, so my hosting cost is ZERO.  All I needed is a domain.

Choosing Sinatra

When it came time to actually building my application out, I first started with Rails.  When it came time to build my model, I stopped.  I didn’t have a need for any model, this application didn’t have a database to begin with, so why would it need one now?  So I ditched Rails, it wasn’t what I needed.

All I needed was to have some static routes and static content that I could have complete control over.  There was some dynamic information shown, but nothing that required a database.  I didn’t even need controllers.  That’s just too much weight to drag around.  All I really needed was to link up routes to content.

For these needs, Sinatra was the perfect fit.  I have one code file that defines my routes and what to do to handle them:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
  'Hello world!'
end

If I want to show a view, it’s:

get '/' do
  erb :index
end

I then can use erb as a view engine (or Haml or whatever).  But I don’t need an IDE, projects, solutions or any junk like that.  I just stick with a text editor like e, and I’m done.

Adios, ASP.NET

Unless I’m building on top of an existing application or are in an IT environment, I can’t really fathom why anyone would choose .NET for static websites these days.  Platforms like Ruby and PHP are cheaper and simpler to develop, deploy and manage with fantastic hosting services like Heroku.  I don’t have to open an IDE, which at that point is just to heavyweight for what I’m trying to do.  Command line and a good text editor is much easier to deal with.  Otherwise, my browser (Chrome) is my IDE.

My hosting cost wasn’t that much to begin with, but it’s now zero.  I don’t even have to worry about deployments, I just push my entire repository up to Heroku with one git push and it manages the rest.  If you’re about to create a new public site or upgrade an existing site, I highly recommend giving Heroku a look.  If nothing else, it will depress you on how easy web site development and deployments can be.