Here's the same in Camping, using plain Ruby:

    class Blog < R '/blog/(\d+)'
      def service(id) @blog = Blog.get(id); super end
      def get(id)     render :blog end
      def put(id)     @blog.update_attributes(@input) end
    end

What I discovered recently when doing a new Rails 3 app was that the RESTful CRUD stuff is all boilerplate. This is true about Sinatra apps, too: Every GET, POST, PUT and DELETE are just wrappers around find, create update and destroy. I used Rabl for generating JSON, so it was possible to write a single serialization for all objects. So why not just boil everything down to the minimal code required?

Something like this:

    handle '/blog'

That's it. This makes some assumptions:

* That /blog maps to a class Blog which it can load and save. * That you either use "fat models" (with callbacks that munge data and perform actions when data changes) or external observers (like ActiveRecord's observers). * That the model supports all four CRUD actions.

When you want additional verbs:

    handle 'GET /blog/search' do
      MySearchEngine.search(params[:q])
    end

Or object-specific ones:

    handle 'GET /blog/:id/search' do |blog|
      MySearchEngine.search(params[:q], :blog_id => blog.id)
    end

In fact, aside from extra verbs, you could get away with no code at all, since you could introspect the database layer to discover which classes are mappable.

My app is a JavaScript-based single-page HTML5 web application using Backbone, so there is almost no server-side frontend code, meaning my app is basically a server-side database anyway.

The same in Cuba (http://cuba.is):

    Cuba.define do
      on "blog/:id" do |id|
        blog = Blog.get(id)

        on(get) { res.write blog }
        on(put) { blog.update(req.params); res.write :ok }
      end
    end

Right, I guess that sort of rewriting of CRUD situations would be nice in some cases.

Although in real applications, most of your methods are complex enough that you'd want them to be multiline blocks, at which point it would start to get really ugly IMO.

Anyway it sounds like I'm being more critical than I actually am I think.

But my un-DRY annoyance with Sinatra isn't writing multiple blocks with route declarations for CRUD methods, so much as not being able to refer to those routes in your views abstractly. ie., if you decide you want to change from /comments/:id to /awesome-comments/:id, it's a headache.

I assume there are plugins to fix that annoyance, but I'd have like Sinatra to generally have routing more abstracted from specific URL paths.