Sinatra vs WCF WebAPI

Yesterday I decided that there has to be a better way to expose data through JSon than to spin up MVC applications and abuse it to write a JSon returning service.

Since I was listening to Glenn Block on Hanselminutes talk about the WCF WebAPI I decided to give it a try and followed the hello-world article on codeplex to see what all the fuss is about.

It took about an hour to make the example work on my machine, and I completely failed in returning a clr-object as JSon. So after two hours of trying I gave up and decided to go to bed.

Today I had a few minutes of free time so I decided to have a look at Sinatra. 35 seconds later and I had a working “Hello World” running on my machine, with no configuration in 4 lines of code!

I then spent another 2 minutes figuring out how to return JSon from Sinatra (another 2 lines of code) and then decided to write this blog post.

Even though WebAPI is still a work-in-progress (that’s why it took so long to figure stuff out), it’s obcene that a WCF WebAPI “Hello World” requires more lines in web.config than Sinatra requires to do the whole sample.

In Sinatra the WCF sample literally boils down to these 10 lines:

require 'sinatra'
people = []
get "/hello/" do
	"Hello #{people.join(", ")}"
end
post "/hello/:person" do
	people << params[:person]
end

It’s tragic that you need to reference 6 .NET assemblies to achieve the things other platforms can do in 10 lines of code.. And the ruby code is also cleaner.