Technologies and platforms used

We use a number of technologies in this chapter, mainly revolving around the Ruby programming language and its various libraries. In addition to Ruby and its libraries we also use a few mashups, which are described below. We have described Sinatra, DataMapper, and Haml in the previous chapters so we will not repeat this here. Please refer to Chapter 1, Cloning Internet Applications for the details if you need to refresh your memory.

JSON

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format, often used within a web context. It is meant to be easy for humans to read as well as for machines to parse or create. As the name suggests, it was derived from Javascript for representing simple data structures and hashes. However, JSON itself is not programming language-specific and has many implementations in various languages. It is increasingly becoming the popular alternative to sending and receiving XML.

In this application we will be using the...