Vegas::Runner is dirt simple. Basically, take your existing (or brand new) Sinatra, create a bin/ file and pass your app class to Vegas::Runner. Now when you run the bin, Vegas takes care of PID’s, options, finding a suitable Rack::Handler, etc. (More information here). Gembox is the canonical example, but there are others out there.

Before today, even though I claimed otherwise, Vegas was pretty dependent on Sinatra. I was O.K. with that. Sinatra had some niceties for starting up that I found it easier to rely on. Then I realized the potential of mounting/launching other, non-Sinatra Rack applications.

For example, Cloudkit is pretty cool. With the newest version of Vegas and Cloudkit, I can create a single file, command-line launch-able data based web service.

First, I create a bin. Lets call it ‘cloudcity’. The first thing I need to do is tell the bin that we’re going to execute this with ruby:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

Next, lets require Cloudkit and Vegas.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'vegas'
require 'cloudkit'

OK, now that our env, is setup, we just have to build a little JSON schemaless data storage. Rack::Builder lets us just group all of the Rack middlewares and extensions we want into an ‘app’:

app = Rack::Builder.new do
  expose :people, :places
end

Next we just need to pass this app to Vegas::Runner and give it a name:

Vegas::Runner.new(app, 'cloudcity')

Thats it. Heres the whole app:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'vegas'
require 'cloudkit'

app = Rack::Builder.new do
  expose :people, :places
end

Vegas::Runner.new(app, 'cloudcity')

Now if we run: cloudcity in the terminal, Vegas will find an open port and launch us directly into the app. For now, we get this informative but semi-useless message:

Buuuuut, if we hit ’/people’ we get a friendly JSON delivery:

{"total":0,"offset":0,"uris":[]}

So that was a pretty trivial example. Vegas didnt add that much to Cloudkit’s existing awesomeness. However, take this as a prod to think about the possibilites. You could build a javascript app, that uses cloudkit as storage, package it as a gem, with a Vegas powered bin, and have an easily distributable browser-based application with JSON storage. The beauty of Cloudkit, is that besides Rack and Ruby, there arent really any other dependencies to worry about. I haven’t tried it yet, but potentially, you could use Vegas to distribute a modern (Rack-based) Rails app (the database part might be a little tough, though).

Get Started

• Watch a Screencast (iPhone)
• Read the Introduction
• Read the Docs
• Follow @sammy_js
• Join the mailing list

The Story

About three months ago, when I was knee deep in hacking and playing with Sinatra I had this weird moment as I woke up one morning: “What if I could build Sinatra in JavaScript?” At that point it was just a challenge – I had just started doing almost full-time JS for a client and it seemed like a fun project.

As I started to actually implement it (slowly in short spurts on the weekends), I realized that using the power of JavaScript’s closures and jQuery’s powerful event system, this could be something more then just a ‘clone’. It could actually be . . . useful!

With that in mind, I set out to actually make is usable. I cleaned up the code, I wrote some example implementations, and most importantly – I documented the shit out of it.

I’m pretty excited about it (can’t you tell?) especially about its possible uses for structuring applications on the front-end for RESTful Databases and services. Embed it in a CouchApp to build an entire application in JavaScript while having access to a full range of documents/querying abilities.

The Future

I’m going to continue refining and adding examples. Please feel free to email me or contact me through github with questions/feedback.

Happy Friday!

The episode also features Rich Kilmer – whose talk about MacRuby and HotCocoa totally blew my mind.

I haven’t even returned to NY yet – I’m writing this in Pivotal Labs SF - who were nice enough to let me steal a desk and some WIFI for an afternoon.

GoGaRuCo was amazing. Another awesome conference. Thanks to Josh Susser, Leah Silber, and the other organizers and volunteers for making a fantastic weekend of nerding out. I’m going to be posting my slides soon, and there should be a full video recording of it within the next couple of weeks. You can see a quick rundown (via live-blogging of my talk) at the Pivotal site.

(Some of) The highlights of the weekend:

• Getting a real explanation of CloudKit from Jon Crosby. Once I understood what it was – a fully compliant REST interface that abuses HTTP to create a standardized ‘appliance’ that sits on type of Rack. Think: Rack CouchDB.
• Talking to Yehuda Katz about why Javascript/jQuery is awesome and why the next version of rubygems will solve all my problems.
• Seeing Jaqui Maher talk about solving REAL problems with ruby/rails.
• Greg Borenstein blowing my mind with the knowledge that I could use Ruby to hack an Arduino.

Most importantly: I met some very cool, extremely friendly, and super-fun people in this beautiful city. I can’t wait to come back.

Update: I posted my slides from the talk at scribd

• My proposal got enough votes (thanks everyone) and I’ll be speaking at GoGaRuCo in just about three weeks. Once again, I’m honored to be even listed on the same page as some of the other speakers. I’ll be speaking about Sinatra and considering I’m on real vacation next week, I’ll have a little less then two weeks to prepare my talk. It’s gonna be AWESOME. Also this means I’m going to be in SF the weekend of the conference (I’m staying until Monday April 20th) so if you’d like to meet up, shoot me an email or a tweet.

• Thanks to the wonderful world of open source and github, Michael Kohl added a patch to sinatra-gen that allows you to instantly create a heroku instance for you new app as you generate. Pretty nifty. I hope to write up a little tutorial with this once I return.

More soon!

• My article was published in The Rubyist! Thanks to Jeremy McAnally for getting it out. Buy a copy and support a burgeoning dead tree business.
• I was interviewed about Sinatra for Ruby Learning. Thanks to Satish. He’s doing a great job spreading the gospel of Ruby and Rails. If you’re interested in Sinatra – look for his seminars – I’m sure you’ll learn a ton.
• In preparation for my presentation I started adding what I consider pretty good documentation to a couple of my gems/plugins using github pages. See Restful Query, Qadmin, and Qcontent

Other insane news: Its less then a week from Scotland on Rails! My presentation is all wrapped up. I’m getting a little nervous, but looking forward to the fun times ahead of meeting great Rubyists from around the world and having a REAL vacation all over the UK. Exciting!

If you’re going to Scotland on Rails and reading this – please say hello at the conference. Theres a couple projects I’m hoping to hack on there, too.