Ingredient 3: Build a Web Application with Sinatra

Once Ruby is installed, Ruby libraries are managed with gem. To program web applications with Sinatra, you need to run

gem install sinatra

to install the Sinatra gem. This sample full-fledged web application,

require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
  'Hello world!'
end
}

can be accessed in the browser on http://localhost:4567/ after typing ruby webapp.rb.

Ingredient 4: Populate a Database with Measured Values

Now, you still need to store the data in an appropriate way. In general, a database is used for web applications. SQLite is a database designed for simple applications, but that still speaks SQL. The database is part of the Debian sqlite3 package. To use it in Ruby, you also need the Ruby sqlite3 gem.

To create a new database file by the name of db.sqlite3 which will store temperature values at specific times, for example, you would type:

sqlite3 db.sqlite3 'create table temperatures(time integer, t real);'

The Ruby code in Listing 1 [5] uses ActiveRecord to access the database and populate it with values parsed from a CSV file, weather.csv. The rows in the CSV file containing the data from the weather station are structured as described above.

The beauty of ActiveRecord is that it automatically takes care of everything you need for reading and writing to databases. In Listing 1, on seeing the Temperature class, it understands that it needs to access the temperatures table, and the variable names (time, t) tell it the columns in the database table that it must write.

Ingredient 5: Read Measured Values from the Database

The data can be read conveniently from the database, again thanks to ActiveRecord. Listing 2 reads all entries in the values variable at one fell swoop. At the same time, the time values are multiplied by 1,000.

The array comprises pairs of times and measured values, so it can later be interpreted by the chart library to provide data points. The inspect method generates a matching string from the array ("[[1363465023000, -1.3], [1363468623000, -1.9], ...]"). In Listing 2, this string is output in the terminal. Later, the string is integrated into the website at the appropriate point in the JavaScript code.