In this post, I’m going to tell you what I learned doing a series of Rails security exercises developed by Bearclaw, a Rails security consultancy. Before I go into the exercises, though, I want to send a huge thank you to Ali Najaf, founder of Bearclaw. What I’ve learned here is due to the thoughtfulness of the exercises he’s put together and his willingness to try something new by sharing them with me.

Earlier, I explained how I built my personalized url shortner in Sinatra. This past week, we’ve been spinning up demo apps in Rails instead, so I wanted to walk through a little comparison of the two frameworks. As one of our instructors said, “Sinatra is like a stripped-down muscle car and Rails is like an RV.” Here’s how setting up a simple “Hello, World!” app breaks down between the two.