# Read & Write data on the web **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 25, 2010, 5:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/read-write-data-on-the-web/185726 "2010-03-25T05:52:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![omegas7](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/o/aca169/32.png) [@omegas7](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/omegas7)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2010, 5:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/read-write-data-on-the-web/185726/1 "2010-03-25T05:52:40Z")
What do I need to read & write data from the web? I simply want to have something on my site to be like a variable $data, and my application can connect to the site and edit $data or other variables (or create new ones). Like… $data[id] = 500 etc… ---
**Author:** ![omegas7](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/o/aca169/32.png) [@omegas7](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/omegas7)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2010, 9:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/read-write-data-on-the-web/185726/2 "2010-03-25T09:52:17Z")
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 10:52 PM, Jose W. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > ## What do I need to read & write data from the web? I simply want to have something on my site to be like a variable $data, and my application can connect to the site and edit $data or other variables (or create new ones). Like… $data[id] = 500 etc… > > Posted via [http://www.ruby-forum.com/](http://www.ruby-forum.com/). I’m going to suggest checking out Peepcode’s Sinatra screencast. It’s a little over an hour, $9, and covers well beyond what you’re asking about. After you get some basic app running on your computer, check out Heroku for hosting, which is so easy that I was able to use it, and I don’t know _anything_ about deployment (note I was using Rails not sinatra, but it should be the same process, b/c Heroku should support any Rack based application), and it’s free for something as small as what you’re talking about, but has the ability to upgrade if you ever need more. other side note: Heroku has these little “show you how easy it is” examples that are like 3 lines long, but they usually leave out the databasey stuff. I think I spent an hour or two messing with it before I finally found a tutorial that had “$heroku db:push” which was all the Heroku tutorial was missing. Anyway, point is Sinatra is extremely simple, you should be able to get the hang of it extremely quickly, and heroku is cheap and simple. I’d expect you can get your app up within 4 hours. Maybe longer if you’ve never done anything web based. Also, there is a really simple Authentication system they add at the end of the Peepcode, pay attention to that, because you don’t want other people to be able to alter your data. [http://peepcode.com/products/sinatra](http://peepcode.com/products/sinatra) > **[Cloud Application Platform | Heroku](https://www.heroku.com/)** > > Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to build, run, and operate applications entirely in the cloud.