Sinatra is pretty great for rapid prototyping. For example: https://gist.github.com/3062572 https://gist.github.com/3062572 Then I just invoke it with "shotgun

Sinatra is pretty great for rapid prototyping. For example: https://gist.github.com/3062572 https://gist.github.com/3062572 Then I just invoke it with "shotgun rest.rb" and hit http://localhost:9393/ http://localhost:9393/ and I'm up and running. It's not running through Apache, but it's not really significantly more difficult than PHP prototyping. curl -d "foo[bar]=1&foo[baz]=hello%20there" http://localhost:9393/foos {"result":"success"} curl http://localhost:9393/foos/1 {"bar":"1","baz":"hello there","id":"1"} Easy peasy.