If you look around the news you will always hear about some big name that has been hacked and had their password database compromised. In recent news, this has happened to many people like these guys and them, but if you keep looking you’ll find tons more. The topic of security and how you are storing passwords always comes up, but this is not the point of this posting. I wanted to take this time to point out a Mozilla based project which helps in this area.

WebSockets are a hot topic now a days with the HTML5 push, even though they are not officially part of HTML5 spec. If WebSockets are new to you, they are a way of being able to keep a connection open from the client’s browser to the server. It will let you push data back and forth, think AJAX but without the need of pulling for new data over and over. WebSockets give you the ability to push, which gives you a very close to real time update on the client’s side.

If you have worked with Ruby on Rails Activerecord before you know how it makes working with databases very easy by giving you objects to deal with communication with the database. MongoMapper is an Object-Document-Mapper (ODM), it takes a lot of ideas from Activerecord and in turn should be very familiar. I found MongoMapper a good fit for people that want to use Sinatra ,because you are able to simply make your model classes right within the application file.

To take the authentication with Sinatra a bit farther you may want to use another service to do your authentication against. This is some sample code adapted from a Rails example. This code takes use of the linkedin gem from Wynn Netherland to do the authentication and also make some calls to the LinkedIn API. There are other gems that just do authentication for many services like Facebook and Twitter but for this sample I wanted to be able to make additional calls to the LinkedIn API.

One of the things I’m heavily looking in to is Sinatra, it’s a micro-web framework which I feel gives you more freedom over your project and lets you rapidly prototype things out. You are able to keep a full app in one file which is perfect for use with Github’s Gist. Sinatra lets you quickly build web apps in a short amount of time with less complexity then a Rails app.