Categories
Rails

Opiniated software

DHH talking about pluralisation in Rails, in Scott Hanselman’s RailsConf interview with him and Martin Fowler:

…it was kind of a firewall. It was a firewall for aesthetics. So if you could not appreciate why we did this, why we chose to go through all of this work to get prettier code, maybe you weren’t in the state of mind that was a good fit for this community. So we tried to weed people out in some sense – if they don’t share the same cultural bias, if they don’t share the same values, then maybe they’re not a good fit for the Rails community.

It’s often said that Rails makes it very easy to Do The Right Thing, whether it’s separation of concerns, unit tests, DRY or whatever. I wonder how many people start using better practices because Rails pushes them in the right direction, or whether they choose Rails because they see the obvious evidence of good practices its philosophy and architecture.
[tags]rails,dhh,opinionated software,martin fowler,hanselminutes[/tags]

Categories
Java Rails

Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails…

The guys over at Rails Envy have created an excellent J2EE vs Rails parody of Apple’s Get a Mac adverts:

Apparently there are more coming over the next few days.

Categories
Agile Rails Ruby

Are we spending more and more time writing tests?

A while ago I wrote about testing trivialities, and claimed that no matter how simple the piece of code is, it still ought to have a test. I followed it up with some thoughts on using a helper to simplify writing specs for common validations. Even using the helper, the actual test code for a single validation outweighs the production code by a factor of more than three:

Categories
Agile Java Rails Ruby Software

cruisecontrol.rb

In case you missed it, those nice people at ThoughtWorks released CruiseControl.rb yesterday.

Categories
Agile Rails Ruby

DRYing out model specs

[Updated 14/3/07: corrected specify_attributes as per Paul’s comment]
[Updated 18/12/07: modified to avoid crazy RSpec errors]

A week or so ago I wrote about writing specs for simple pieces of functionality (particularly those that are arguably just configuration, like Rails validations). I argued that it’s important to test-drive even the simple things – however, the amount of test code can get out of hand.