Sinatra 1.3 adds streaming

The developers of Sinatra, the light-weight web framework for Ruby programmers, have announced the availability of a new feature release, Sinatra 1.3.0, which allows applications to keep connections open over time while still delivering data over the connection.

The developers point out that the new streaming implementation "abstracts away the differences between all the different Rack servers". Streaming is useful for implementing collaboration and chat systems or any browser applications which receive irregular updates over a long period of time. Other additions to Sinatra 1.3.0 include support for the "PATCH" HTTP verb, inspired by GitHub's API and a helper for logging. Sinatra 1.3.0 will drop support for Ruby prior to 1.8.6 and Rack prior to version 1.3, but the developers will maintain Sinatra 1.2 until the end of life of Rack 1.2. To that end, a number of patches have been backported to the Sinatra 1.2.x tree to produce Sinatra 1.2.7.

As there are many Sinatra extensions now available, and with some being used by a large number of apps, the Sinatra developers are creating Sinatra-Contrib. This project will contain the most useful extensions, with older ones rewritten to the Sinatra developer's coding standard. With each future release of Sinatra, the developers promise there will always be a compatible release of "contrib" to ensure an easier transition to the new version. Other developers will also find Sinatra Recipes useful; it is an independent collection of community techniques, documentation and tutorials for the web framework.

(djwm)