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by automach 5249 days ago
As someone that has been writing production Rails and Sinatra apps for years, I have to recommend against using Padrino. Rails scales up and down pretty well, and I don't really see a need for Sinatra in anything but very small or single-purpose apps.

You can even write a Sinatra clone in very little code on top of Rails: http://yehudakatz.com/2009/08/26/how-to-build-sinatra-on-rai...

If you already know Rails, there is very little reason to build a substantial app in anything "smaller". The reality is that for any moderately-sized app, you will end up using many of the parts of Rails that you think are unnecessary in the beginning. Especially as your app grows.

I tried using Padrino for an app a year ago, and while the framework has probably matured since then, I moved back to Rails fairly quickly due do a lack of polish/documentation/community/benefit other than being different.

There is a common tendency to find a part of a framework that doesn't work exactly the way you want, and in turn throw the entire framework out and seek out or write something new. I still prefer the way Merb and Sinatra handle responses, where the controller action return value is the response sent to the client. But the benefits that Rails provides so outweigh many of these kind of preferences that it's usually best to just embrace the way the framework works and move on to actually building an app that does something.

It's also short sighted to discount how valuable the wealth of existing documentation and extentions exist for an established framework such as Rails.

The presentation makes it sounds as though by using Rails you have to use SASS and Coffeescript. This is not true, you can easily use plain JavaScript and CSS if you want.

The majority of developers will be more productive in Rails.

1 comments

Sinatra has a great use case in Service Oriented Architecture and APIs. One Rails app supported by 4-5 Sinatra/Rack apps.