A piece of advise that is often given to developers who want to keep improving, is to learn a new programming language every year. I mostly think it holds true if you try to learn a new paradigme – because just learning new syntax won’t really get you anywhere.

Koans

One way of learning a new language is of course to buy a book or two, and start reading and doing some samples and small applications. Another way of going about it is to try some of the koans, interactive interpreters and introductory guides that can be found online.

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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.