From: Hassan Schroeder <hassan.schroeder@...>
Date: 2013-06-16T02:25:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Can I use Sinatra to render dynamic pages?

On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 9:46 AM, Ruby Student <ruby.student@gmail.com> wrote:

> My statement about "overkill" WAS NOT INTENDED TO BE FOR Sinatra. If you go
> back you'll find that I was talking about TomCat.

To quote:
"If Sinatra is overkill for what I want, perhaps I should look into
something different."

And again, it's "Tomcat", NOT "TomCat"; precision counts, in programming and
discussions about programming :-)

> My application will, every second, read the content of the file

Is there any reason you can't get the data direct from the process
that's writing
that file? Reading from a file being written every second seems a bit clumsy.
Just to muddy the water a bit :-)

> Display the new information, counter, on the browser WITHOUT THE USER HAVING
> TO REFRESH IT. In other words, I want to refresh the browser's content
> without user having to do anything. The new information must be continuously
> be updated and displayed.

> Someone suggested Javascript but I don't want to start learning yet another
> programming tool when I think that Ruby and some web tool such as Sinatra
> might be able to help me with this. Rails was also suggested. I am probably
> still not making any sense!

The difference between your Shoes application and a web app is
that a web app is a client-server architecture. You can certainly use
Ruby and Sinatra for the server part, which responds to data requests,
but those requests come from a web client, in this case a browser. And
JavaScript is the language you use to program behavior in browsers.

That said, you could most simplistically use a meta-refresh tag in
an iframe on your page to display the changing data without any
user action. I certainly wouldn't try to refresh an entire page, even
a simple one, every second.

One way or another, you're going to have to learn how web clients
work, though. :-)

Good luck,
-- 
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ hassan.schroeder@gmail.com
http://about.me/hassanschroeder
twitter: @hassan