A few days ago I discovered Padrino, an excellent ruby framework built on top of Sinatra. What can be a better than experimenting with it? Build an actual website with it!

So last night I ported Wuit.com from using vanilla PHP + Flourish to using Padrino + DataMapper + Haml.

The entire porting experience was positive, albeit the website only has two pages.

I did encounter a strange problem with Capistrano though - both current_release and latest_release were giving me strange results. In the end I had to modify my deployment recipe to overcome this.

For building small to medium sized projects, I think Padrino is an excellent choice, as it offers a more complete foundation than Sinatra, and is not as heavy as Rails.