It’s nice to see the Padrino framework offering support for Sinatra 1.3 so soon after its release. The new streaming API in Sinatra as well as projects like sinatra-synchrony should pay big dividends for Padrino. Nathan Esquenazi and the rest of the team believe the combination of simplicity and power makes Padrino the ideal Ruby web framework for newcomers.
We have been using test-unit and shoulda in Padrino as long as the framework has been around. I am a personal fan of test-unit + shoulda and have been using the combination successfully in many projects. However, times change and the fact that Ruby 1.9 seems to recommend minitest over test-unit encouraged us to take a look at the pain of upgrading.
We wanted a faster test suite and less external dependencies. So we decided to bite the bullet and convert our entire test suite over to the minitest test library. Built into 1.9 but available as a gem for 1.8.X, this library is quite stable and fast. The best part is that it has a lot of the great parts of shoulda built in.
Check out the newly improved, YARD-powerd API docs or Episode 0.2.7 for more on Padrino.