One might think that the title of this blogpost is due to the fact that this summer I will be turning 30.
However it is actually a task I have been looking into, that could also be phrased as: I wish to build a REST based service, what are my options? With REST gaining in popularity I think this a question that a number of developers are asking themselves these days.

First of all what is REST? REST is about staying true to the HTTP protocol, and using it to communicate between a client and a server - as opposed to SOAP. To parafrase from Wikipedia being RESTful is about using URIs, HTTP verbs and mediatypes as the means to communicate using a traditional request/response model.

Lately I have heard quite a few people mention the Sinatra framework, which is a very light-weight webframework for Ruby. Already being fond of Ruby I decided to take a look at Sinatra, so I could see what all the fuss was about.

Right off the bat I decided to install Ruby instead of going with IronRuby like I had done so far. Sadly I am not feeling too secure about the future of IronRuby, since Microsoft stopped investing in it - but of course I really hope that it will continue to go foreward as open source. Because of this insecurity and because of basic curiosity I decided to to “pure Ruby”. After all getting started is just running the installer you can download from ruby-lang.