- Aug
- 10
- 2007
Ruby Hoedown - Charity Session and Merbage
By: Robert Dempsey | Tags:This morning at the Hoedown Chad Fowler, Marcel Molina and Bruce Tate did a great charity presentation on Ruby testing that raised almost $3000 from the Hoedowners. They discussed unit and functional testing, glanced over rspec (they don’t use it but it looks nice), and rcov, which we at ADS use to show clients how much of the code is covered by tests. They also introduced us to mocking and stubbing. Don’t know what that is? Neither did I really until this morning. Read Martin Fowler’s discussion on what each of these are and the differences between the two. Marcel and Chad also showed us how to use flexmock, which makes mocking and stubbing (rather) easy.
An interesting happening at the charity session was the slightly different approaches to testing of Chad and Marcel. It just goes to show that there are many ways to approach a problem, and even the people that we see at the top can do it differently.
I had a chance to talk with Bruce Tate about testing and Rails. He backed up what others have said - testing will speed up the coding process. He and I also talked about his charity site - Changing the Present. There is a growing movement in the Ruby/Rails community to give back not only to the community itself but to the communities in which we live. Look for Rails For All and Changing the Present to start working together soon.
The first presentation of the day was by Ezra Zygmuntowicz on Merb (which he created). Merb is a “lightweight MVC Ruby app server” that delivers high performance for dynamic pages. One popular use of Merb is for uploads/downloads. By using Merb for these functions, you can keep your UI snappy and not tie up Mongrel processes for (potentially) lengthy file uploads. Ezra repeatedly said that his intent is to keep the core of Merb small and hackable, and easily extendable using plugins. Great stuff.
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