Articles

Selenium and CruiseControl.rb

Within the project we’re developing we found ourselves pretty attracted from the features offered by Selenium so we started to use its beautiful IDE to create behavioral tests that try to ensure our quality requirements.

8 tips for testing Rails apps with Cucumber

Here are eight things my team has found to be true after working with Cucumber for about 6 months.

should_set_the_flash better

should_set_the_flash_to doesn't do quite what I'd like. I want to: a) specify which level of flash should be set (ie make sure it's a notice and not an error) and b) not care exactly what notice has been set.

IMO tying your tests down too hard to ephemeral strings is annoying... what is somebody changed the wording from "user created" to "thanks for signing up"? You have to change your test

New Ruby 1.9 Envycasts Released!

Today I’m announcing the release of Ruby 1.9, What you need to know a two part Envycast staring David A. Black, one of my favorite Ruby authors/teachers. Each envycast is available for $9 or you can get both as a package for just $16 dollars. To make things a little sweeter, you also get 40% off David’s new book The Well-Grounded Rubyist with your purchase.

New Ruby 1.9 Envycasts Released!

Today I'm announcing the release of Ruby 1.9, What you need to know a two part Envycast staring David A. Black, one of my favorite Ruby authors/teachers. Each envycast is available for $9 or you can get both as a package for just $16 dollars. To make things a little sweeter, you also get 40% off David's new book The Well-Grounded Rubyist with your purchase.

Where is extract filter in Photoshop cs4?

I did some research online and apparently you need to it’s part of a package that requires a separate install.

The following plug-ins and associated files are included in this package:

Issue Tracking with Redmine

I was looking around for a solid issue tracking system, written using Ruby on Rails. There are some good comparisons on wikipedia. Redmine seems like a good choice; all the standard functionality, that you would expect from a issue tracking system, is available. For instance:-

  • Raising Bugs/Defects
  • Request Features
  • Adding Patches
  • Roadmaps
  • Forums
  • Wiki
  • Code Repository

The code repository can use the source control apps, Git and Subversion.

All in all, a pretty solid choice.

Passing a hash of conditions to find in rails

I just stumbled across a neat trick in ActiveRecord which could help make your code more readable:

Evented Programming With jQuery

Over the past several years, I’ve been actively using jQuery for a variety of things. Early on, I shared the frustration that people had around using jQuery for more substantial projects. Starting with version 1.2 and continuing with version 1.3, however, jQuery provides a powerful evented model that can be used to build up fairly complex applications using evented, as opposed to traditional objected oriented programming.

New to the CAN: Widget, json fixes, etc

I just pushed a new version the Calendar About Nothing:

Kernel | Rails Fire

Kernel

Introducing Cramp

Cramp is the latest entry on the ruby web frameworks list. However, unlike all the others, Cramp is an asynchronous framework, always running inside EventMachine reactor loop. Cramp isn’t a good fit for most of the web applications out there. However, Cramp is good at holding and working with a large number of open connections. Hence it’ll work great for things like comet, long polling, streaming API or even when your application needs to handle thousands of concurrent connections.

The Art of Library

Honk if you love hacking! I know I do, and boy is it ever satisfying to turn a tough problem into a clever solution. But as you tumble down the slippery hacking slopes, picking up loose bits of code, you may find the itch to start writing code for other hackers. Good thought, but realize that implementation is just the tip of the iceberg.

How Boson Enhances Your Irb Experience

In previous posts, Boson was introduced as a command framework, usable from the commandline and irb. In this post, we’ll focus on how Boson enhances irb by treating methods like shell commands.

Original Author Name: 
Gabriel Horner

Boson - Command Your Ruby Universe

Introducing Boson, a command/task framework that could change how you collect and execute your ruby code. Sure, there’s rake, thor and a dozen other gems. But how many will let you create a universe of ruby commands you can run from the commandline and irb?

higgs boson decay

Original Author Name: 
Gabriel Horner

Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One A110

acer-aspire-oneFor my weeks on call, Brightbox let me choose an ultra-mobile (netbook) PC. This will allow me to leave the house without having to carry a heavy full-size laptop with me.

I wanted one that worked well with Linux, preferably Ubuntu Netbook Remix, had SSD rather than hard disk, and built-in 3G connectivity.

Structs inside out

Today we’re back to normal blog mode, where each article stands for itself. Muppet Labs are closed and we will be continuing our journey across the Ruby universe starting with an indepth look at Ruby’s Struct class — Ruby’s Swiss army knife for structured data.

Struct can be used without any additional require statement — it’s just there. This means it comes with zero additional overhead during initial interpreter startup — one of the many advantage of using Struct. But first let’s look at the basics.

Double Shot #529

I’ll likely be doing a Snow Leopard upgrade on my main dev box some time next week – after I have a good bootable backup. Meanwhile, I’ve collected a bunch of links to (I hope) avoid some of the trouble spots.

Native MRI Callback

A few weeks ago after a discussion with raggi (yet again) about callback implementations for the Ruby language, we kicked off an attempt at a minimal native object that’s very close in performance to method dispatch.

Here’s a representation of the pure ruby version :

The game plan

The following inefficiencies would have to be addressed :

Rescue exit

While debugging an unrelated problem in Nanite I've stumbled over this feature in Ruby:

You can rescue the call to Kernel.exit.

Calling exit will just raise a SystemExit exception that can catched as any other. 

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

begin
  exit
rescue SystemExit => e
  puts "somebody wanted to #{e}"
end

puts "after exiting"

This is clearly documented in the RDoc but still I was surprised.

Scripting Java Libraries With JRuby

One of the most powerful features of JRuby (and one that’s unique to JRuby) is the fact that you can call out to any Java library as it if were just another piece of Ruby code. In fact, other than a few small details, you might not even realize you’re using Java libraries. Today I’ll walk through a quick example of “scripting” the MIDI support built into the Java platform.

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