Examples

The following project has some basic examples that showcase the following functionality:

YAML

YAML is the standard configuration format for Rails applications.

Run the rake task rake yaml

JSON

Run the rake task rake json

XML

Parsing XML is often difficult because of how complicated it can be shaped. A tool that I have found immensely useful for both translating to and from XML is Happymapper.

The fork of the happymapper project that I maintain contains more examples in the README documentation.

Run the rake task rake xml

Geocoder

This great gem will attach automatically to your Sinatra application. To get it to work though you cannot use the traditional host and port localhost:4567 or 127.0.0.1:4567. You will have to find out your IP address and use that when testing locally.

Visit icanhazip or even rubygeocoder to find out your IP address to use for testing.

Run the rake task rake geocoder

Amazon Bit Bucket Services

Heroku does not allow you to store files locally so you will often have to employ Amazon Web Services as your file support if you want to write to or read from a file. It's actually much easier than one might expect. The hardest part is setting up your Amazon Web Services account and creating a Bucket to store your file data.

Amazon does in fact charge for their services, however, the amount that
you may use for testing is likely to charge you nothing or pennies.

Create an Amazon Web Services Account
Find the following data that you need to place in a s3.yml

development: bucket: BUCKET_NAME access_key_id: ACCESS_KEY_ID secret_access_key: SECRET_KEY_ID
Run the rake task rake amazon
Check your Amazon Web Services Console to see the file that was created.

RMagick (powered by Imagemagick)

RMagick requires Imagemagick. For MAC users it is likely easiest to install it through homebrew with brew install imagemagick.

Imagemagick allows you to some some amazing things with images.

Install imagemagick
Run the rake task rake image