The Ruby world has been blessed with more than its fair share of frameworks for developing web applications and services over the years. Recently, though, two of them have emerged as the clear leaders in the field. Most readers of this post will have heard of Ruby on Rails. It was created by in 2004 by David Heinemeier Hansson and provides an MVC framework that helps to boost productivity whilst keeping developers happy. Sinatra was created by Blake Mizerany in 2007 and is a domain-specific language that wraps a lightweight HTTP request and response layer on top of Rack. It’s minimalistic approach is both elegant and classy. The stats at RubyGems.org certainly show how popular both of these frameworks are: Rails has 7 million downloads and Sinatra has 1.5 million. Rails was the reason I got into Ruby web development, but in recent years I’ve been using Sinatra much more. In fact, have found that Sinatra, along with a few gems, is usually all I need when building an app. This led me to wonder whether Sinatra is suitable for tackling any project. When is is best to use Sinatra and when is Rails the right choice? Are there any Rubyists on this forum that have worked with both of these frameworks would really love to hear your thoughts.

I hope this does not start a Rails vs Sinatra battle Ok...I use Rails and am yet to use Sinatra, so my talk would be short and based on what I've read. Rails has a upper hand above Sinatra when we look at the community built round both frameworks. The Rails community and resources are both super active when compared to rails. Thus a beginner to Rails has tons of resources if he wants to venture into Rails. Sinatra is useful when building a light application but when scaling comes into view you surely would start having issues. Rails is robust is handling such issues. No wonder its used for Github, Basecamp and the likes. If you want to make a light application and you want it to be fast then Sinatra is good to go. The error messages in Sinatra is quiet descriptive. Personally, I'll choose Rails over Sinatra, no hating

Am getting there sha...aspirant of uniport... Computer science...so all dis rails,road,air..i go know all of dem

kinsomicrote:
I hope this does not start a Rails vs Sinatra battle Ok...I use Rails and am yet to use Sinatra, so my talk would be short and based on what I've read. Rails has a upper hand above Sinatra when we look at the community built round both frameworks. The Rails community and resources are both super active when compared to rails. Thus a beginner to Rails has tons of resources if he wants to venture into Rails. Sinatra is useful when building a light application but when scaling comes into view you surely would start having issues. Rails is robust is handling such issues. No wonder its used for Github, Basecamp and the likes. If you want to make a light application and you want it to be fast then Sinatra is good to go. The error messages in Sinatra is quiet descriptive. Personally, I'll choose Rails over Sinatra, no hating

I totally agree with as regards using Rails for really large projects. But if you have not tried Sinatra then i think you should give it a shot. In my opinion, Sinatra is perfect for not only small project but also medium sized projects as well. Its also great for developing restful web services in Ruby