The challenge for the fourth week was building a simplified Twitter clone that will allow users to post messages (aka peeps) to a public stream. This challenge requires the implementation of user authentication process.

Different technologies are used in this project:

• Sinatra (including usage of Partials and Flash): Sinatra is a web application library that focuses on “quickly creating web-applications in Ruby with minimal effort”.

• DataMapper: An Object Relational Mapper (ORM) written in Ruby. In computer science, ORM is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. By using DataMapper our model objects gain the ability to communicate with the database and treat the table columns as Ruby attributes.

• Database cleaner: Set of strategies for cleaning your database in Ruby. Database cleaner ensures a clean state during tests.

• Bcrypt: This gem allows developers to easily harden the applications against attacks attempting to steal password information from users. It is our responsibility as a web developer to make our web applications secure.

• Rake: Rake is Ruby make, a make-like language written in Ruby. Rake is used extensively, especially for the innumerable little administrative tasks necessary when developing database-backed web applications. In this case, the main tasks are upgrading or migrating our database.

You can see my work on this GitHub repo. The application has been deployed on Heroku. You can share your peeps with the world here.