Episode 159: More on Cucumber
There is a lot more to Cucumber than I showed in an earlier episode. See how to refactor complex scenarios in this episode.Heroku and GoDaddy CNAME
If you're trying to get Heroku working with your GoDaddy-hosted DNS, you're going to have problems adding a CNAME record for "@". The system will complain and ask for a valid hostname, even though GoDaddy's own documentation says that "@"...State of the Stack: Who's Using What In Production
Recently, as part of their new RailsLab site, New Relic released The State of the Stack: A Ruby on Rails Benchmarking Report. Despite the title, I don't think it's a benchmarking report at all, but it does present some useful information collected from the production environments of over 1000 New Relic customers. You can see which [...]Now With Navigation and Charted Archives
In which I discuss some recent updates to the site.
Get the Obie Fernandez Wallpaper
If you've a Rails developer, no doubt you've probably heard of Obie Fernandez, the founder of Hashrocket and instigator of the controversial Rails Maturity Model. Well, now you can celebrate your love for the chap with this professionally designed wallpaper by nGen Works. On Obie, nGen say: A serial entrepreneur, Obie started his first business at [...]I'm the Newest Member of HAPPYWEBBIES
Big thanks to Carl, Travis, Varick and the whole nGen crew for bestowing this honor on me. But did you have to make me look so fat? :-) http://www.happywebbies.com/store/detail/obie-fernandezHow to Add Simple Permissions into Your Simple App. Also, Thoughtbot Rules!
In which I discuss how I added simple permissions into flightcontrolled.com an app I created and how cool clearance, shoulda, factory girl and paperclip are.
Episode 158: Factories not Fixtures
Fixtures are external dependencies which can make tests brittle and difficult to read. In this episode I show a better alternative using factories to generate the needed records.Run Rails Apps on Nginx In Minutes with Passenger 2.2.1
Two days ago, Phusion (@phusion_nl on Twitter) announced the release of Passenger 2.2.0, a significant update to the dream-come-true Apache module for deploying Rack-based Ruby applications (including Rails, Sinatra, and Ramaze apps). The big deal? It now supports Nginx too. Yes, you can be up and running with your Rails app on an Nginx-based stack [...]Easier Mockups from Rails with Showoff
Showoff is a new Rails plugin that "provides an easy way to include and show off HTML/ERB/Haml mockups." Creator Adam McCrea has put together a blog post explaining how it works. Essentially, Showoff provides a way for you to bring mockups into the standard view/layout setup, rather than the common route of just dumping HTML mockups [...]9 Top Rails Jobs for April 2009
No matter how long the recession drags out for, there seems to be no let up at all on the Rails job front - especially if you're near San Francisco or New York (but we have telecommuting positions listed too!). And.. if you're looking for one you're in the right place! We've had several Rails-focused [...]Remarkable 3.0 Released: RSpec Matchers and Macros for Rails
Carlos Brando and José Valim have just released the version 3.0 of Remarkable. If you are crazy for RSpec and use it with Rails, this is a project that you should check out. Remarkable began as a set of matchers for RSpec, but with this new version it gains support for I18n, pending and disabled macros, [...]Cucumber: building a better World (object)
How to write helper libraries for your Cucumber step definitions and how to upgrade your support libraries from Cucumber 0.2 to 0.3 (released today). In cucumber, each scenario step in a .feature file matches to a Given, When, Then step definition. The step definitions are normal Ruby code. First class, bonnified, honky-tonk Ruby code. And what’s [...] Related posts:- Testing outbound emails with Cucumber My testimonial for Cucumber still stands even in 2009....
- newgem 1.0.0 all thanks to Cucumber The New Gem Generator (newgem) was exciting, moderately revolutionary, and...
- My .irbrc for console/irb The relatively unspoken warhorse of Ruby/Rails programming is the irb/console...
Brian Morearty and Thomas Hanley of Intuit - Ruby on Rails Podcast
The developers of Intuit’s community site talk about building Rails applications.Also Mentioned
- Intuit Community Site
- Brian Morearty
- Thomas Hanley
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The Week Of
Here we are, the week of Golden Gate Ruby Conference 2009. Everything is in good shape, and we're looking forward to having an awesome time. So here is some last-minute information about the conference.
We've got a great program. Really, this is the conference I've always wanted to attend. Check out our schedule and the amazing assemblage of speakers. I want to thank everyone who submitted talk proposals, and also everyone who voted for selecting talks. We couldn't have done it without you.
Our tickets sold out in just four weeks. We'll have a full house of 200 people, and we'll do our best to take care of you so you can get the most out of the conference. We'll be emailing attendees soon with some info about things like parking, the after-hours party and such, so keep an eye on your inbox.
If you're not coming to the conference, we've still got you covered. Pivotal Labs has generously sponsored full video recording of all the sessions, so all our talks will be available for viewing or download soon after the conference. And if you can't wait, justin.tv is going to be at the conf streaming video of the sessions live. We'll also have a small team of live bloggers chronicling the presentations as they go, and we'll have an IRC channel going on freenode at #gogaruco so it's almost like being there but without the swag. The place to go to find the videos and blog posts is pivotallabs.com/gogaruco
Episode 157: RSpec Matchers & Macros
You can improve the readability and remove duplication in RSpec by adding matchers and macros. Learn how in this episode.82,520 minutes on Phusion Passenger
It’s been over 83,520 minutes since I made the switch from using mongrel as my development environment web server to Phusion Passenger. I’ve been extremely impressed with it. Our team has all switched over and haven’t really hit any obstacles in the transition.
Since some people asked me to let them know how this trial period worked out, I felt it was my duty to encourage you all to try it. You can check out my previous post, Switch to Passenger (mod_rails) in development on OSX in less than 7 minutes or your money back! to get rolling.
Additionally, if you’re looking for a streamlined Ruby on Rails deployment environment that includes Passenger, check out Rails Boxcar.
20 articles on Cucumber and a free beverage recipe!
Cucumber has been getting quite a bit of attention in the community and with the new RSpec Book on nearing publication, I predict that by this time next year, it’ll become a household word like boanthropy.
What is Cucumber?
The Cucumber project describes itself as a suite that, “lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid – all rolled into one format.“
One of the great things about Cucumber is that it can be used to test applications in any language. I haven’t been able to track down a lot of articles of how people are using it with other languages, so please comment if you’re aware of some.
In any event, I’ve been collecting and reading resources from a variety of Cucumber aficionados and thought I’d share some links with you. To round it out, I asked on twitter for some others so that I could hit twenty. :-)
- What’s in a Story?, Dan North
- Telling a good story – Rspec stories from the trenches, Joseph Wilk
- Beginning with Cucumber, Ryan Bates (Railscasts)
- Using RSpec, Cucumber and User stories to build our internal systems, Rahoul Baruah
- Cucumber: The Latest in Ruby Testing, Ruby Inside
- Using Cucumber for Acceptance Testing, Noel Rappin
- Behavior Driven Development with Cucumber, Brandon Keepers (presentation/slides)
- Testing capistrano recipes with cucumber, Jeff Dean
- Using Cucumber to Integrate Distributed Systems and Test Messaging, Ben Mabey
- Tutorial: How to install/setup Cucumber, Alan Mitchell
- Testing outbound emails with Cucumber, Dr. Nic Willians
- Proper Cucumber Sintatra Driving, Chris Strom
- On getting started using Cucumber for .NET
- DRY up your Cucumber Steps, Matt Wynne
- Cucumber, Celerity, & FireWatir, Aidy Lewis (presentation/video)
- Cucumber step definition tip: Stubbing time, Bryan Helmkamp
- Story Driven Development Recipes with Cucumber, Sebastien Auvray
- Testing Facebook with Cucumber, Brandon Keepers
- Testing with the help of machinist, forgery, cucumber, webrat and rspec, Etienne van Tonder
- Integration testing SSL with Cucumber
- Continuous Integration Blueprints: How to Build an Army of Killer Robots With Hudson and Cucumber
So.. there you have it. Please post comments with links to any useful articles not mentioned and I’ll try to keep the list updated.
Also, be sure to check out the list of tutorials and related blog posts on the cucumber wiki (github).
FREE RECIPE: Cucumber Water
And now…for the reason you are all here! If you like cucumbers (eating them)... I would highly recommend heading to your local farmers market and purchasing some cucumbers. Aside from being healthy to eat… they can help make a tasty beverage.
Then do the following…
- Chop several slices of a cucumber
- Fill a pitcher with cold water and ice
- Toss in slices of cucumber
- Stir and leave in fridge for a while
- Take out of fridge, pour into cup…
- Drink… hack… and enjoy
Be sure to check out, How to Make Cucumber Water on wikihow for details.
Happy Hacking!
Related Posts (by me)
- RSpec: It Should Behave Like
- Spec Your Views
- Audit Your Rails Development Team
- Is BDD kinkier than TDD?