Note: This article first appeared on 19th July. 2009 but the original is not accessible; hence the reprint.

The Twelve Rules of Sinatra

The Twelve Rules of Sinatra: Download this as a Free Report.

Recently, I was reading Scott Adams’ (of Dilbert fame) blog post “Rule of Twelve” where he stated:

The Rule of Twelve states that if you know twelve concepts about a given topic you will look like an expert to people who only know two or three. If you learn more than twelve concepts about a topic, the value of each additional one drops off considerably. Allow me to be the first to confess that twelve is not a magic and inviolable number.

He also wrote a follow-up post to support his statement: “Twelve Rules of Energy Efficient Building“.

This made me wonder, could we apply the same “Rule of Twelve” to Sinatra?

Here is Jeremy Evans’ take on this:

1. Just like Rails, keep your controller/actions simple, and put most of your business logic in your models. This makes testing and code reuse easier.
2. Also like Rails, avoid excess logic in your views. Add helper methods that the views call to keep the views clean.
3. Unlike Rails, read the Sinatra source. The main part is a single file that’s around 1000 lines of quite understandable Ruby code. Just reading it will probably make you a better programmer.
4. If you have a problem that you think other people probably have (e.g. a Rails-like flash), look first for a Rack middleware that handles it, rather than recreating the wheel.
5. Untested code will probably break sooner than later, so if you want the code to work in the future, write tests.

Well, Jeremy has set the ball rolling. What’s your take on this? Kindly post your thoughts as comments to this blog post. Looking forward to some interesting read.