>All that being said, I think Sinatra is wonderful. So what if it's not a fit for building a whole Basecamp or Github? It's great for teaching someone the basics of how HTTP works and it's great for smaller surface apps or for smaller, isolated parts of bigger apps.
Sinatra is actually a great foundation for big things, although it doesn't give you the whole stack, but only the way how to build your stack.
I've been developing on Padrino (which builds on Sinatra) for 2 years now and I am still surprised by how easy adding features/plugins to Sinatra (and by that, Padrino) is, especially as the most useful Rails plugins now also come with a "pure rack" variant.
On the other side, I often ran into problems with the huge stack that Rails has, so that I had to tackle issues far before I actually needed a feature.
Sinatra is actually a great foundation for big things, although it doesn't give you the whole stack, but only the way how to build your stack.
I've been developing on Padrino (which builds on Sinatra) for 2 years now and I am still surprised by how easy adding features/plugins to Sinatra (and by that, Padrino) is, especially as the most useful Rails plugins now also come with a "pure rack" variant.
On the other side, I often ran into problems with the huge stack that Rails has, so that I had to tackle issues far before I actually needed a feature.