After running around with tutorial projects backed with Sinatra for a while, I actually got myself into creating a couple of Facebook apps with Sinatra to help my friend run mini-contests as a part of an event. One of them, a simple poll application that can host polls, and the other one hosts a few puzzles like Jigsaw, Sudoku and Gomoku. But since the time was tight I couldn't make the Gomoku or Sudoku in time, only Jigsaws. I should say still, it was something real and it did went live (felt omg! lol).

It was so much fun creating it and I discovered a great deal of new things ( few of which I didn't really care about before ) that I can use repetitively to develop simple applications reliably again. Side by side, I was also exposed to a few new technical things. So here I go with all the things I compiled and made into a set of techniques I can use.

Playing Around In Development

While Setting up and Configuring the application

Now, it's easy to set up an application with the settings you need. For instance : setting up an apps directory structure, libraries, a database, any social network api keys if any etc. And right when I was here for the first app, I got the idea (got it the hard way lol) that I shouldn't really go with completely static settings. For example, never do things like "this = that" in the settings if it isn't something really meant to be static. Instead, use "this=that depending on the environment" or even "this=that derived from any special case". The environment I mentioned is in the context of Rack, it can be any of production, test and development.

Environment variables play a key role in the dynamic setup of the application, and that is the main point of doing this. I learned I should never change settings manually if the conditions or environments differ, and let the code decide what settings it should use. Also it's way better to pace all the private keys for your app as environment variables. So take full advantage of it to decide what's suited for the app in different conditions. And environment variables is a cool concept !

Specifically in Sinatra use groups in Gemfiles. Base settings, databases, and testing tools on Rack.env environment variable. And also follow consistent directory structure every time you create and app. I'm even thinking of writing a directory structure builder. And go flexible on it depending on your needs.

While Coding the main application

This side has a lot of potential for nice and clever app inner design. Keep it simple, keep it clean. And NEVER repeat things. If you find yourself repeating something that is lengthy or even something that only has slight variations depending on different conditions then you should really go for functions. The advantage is rather obvious when you imagine the case of changing stuff in them in both styles. Functional style also encourages readability and eases the tracking of logical flaws.

Modularize your app (either internally or externally). It's very likely that your app will be doing different functions that are identifiable individually. If you have mixed and messed it all up together, then you should really break it into different sections. For instance, auth at one part, route handling at one part, helpers at one part etc, and maybe even use classes to handle things in a damn clean way, but yeah it requires experience (never bad to start trying now).

If there is something like "helpers" section in your framework, go for it and put all the tiny and main utilities in there.

Issue cool looking logs in the middle of junk logs of your app. This one really saves time in fixing up things when something goes wrong. Create a simple helper that takes in a message or an error, and shout out a log that can stand out in the app specific logs. Issue them while you do something important in the app.

Know error handling, it's very effective in fixing your application and letting it recover on the fly. And in some cases your app might even crash if you don't handle it well. It's also good in case of debugging.

Praise the holy power of comments. Even if you are going solo, you should use it. It simple makes your application code more clean, more readable and handsome (or beautiful ?) along with proper indentation. And it helps in cases where you are going to re-use some part of the application later in the future. There is also one nice thing with comments : if you follow a systematic comment style, then when the code becomes large you could find sections of your code quickly with Ctrl+Fing the comment.

Now that's it. I will add things about the technical stuff I got into on another post.