Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Testing Velocity - Keeping your test suite fast, Part 1

If you are a Ruby or Rails developer, and you know what you are doing, you are writing tests or specs. Tests express the intent of your code, help verify correctness, and aid in design and exploration. Rails gives you helpful conventions to follow and functional and integration testing support for free out […]

Staging Environments in Rails

(photo @ flickr)
Most Rails apps that grow beyond the “toy” or “small” stage benefit greatly from the addition of a staging environment. Staging is where you deploy to flush out integration issues, to demo new features to users and clients, and generally put the app through its paces in a “production-like” environment before [...]

Tarantula, Rails super-fuzzer, released

Stu has finally released Tarantula over on the main Relevance blog. Tarantula is probably the most exciting open source release Relevance has put out since I've joined the company about half a year ago. It basically will crawl your app intelligently, try putting garbage into forms and query params, and give you a [...]

[ANN] brain_buster 0.8.0 released

I'm happy to release version 0.8.0 of BrainBuster.
This is a long overdue release. I've removed all deprecated code, updated for Rails 2.0, improved specs considerably, and cleaned up the api and views.
Because of the way the filter chain is handled in Rails 2.0, you will now have to handle a captcha failure [...]

autotest without the unit_diff

Ever since getting ZenTest 3.9.1, it seems unit-diff is always turned on. That means your output in autotest is noiser, and I prefer the normal output from my spec or test framework. Anyways, I'm not sure what changed since earlier versions of autotest (maybe the rails command used to override the command string?), [...]

Rails observers make rake db:migrate crash from version 0

Rails observers are typically defined like this in environment.rb:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.action_controller.session_store = :active_record_store
  config.active_record.observers = :user_observer
end

I recently hit an issue where a fresh db:migrate of an app with a standard observer blew out every time. After some digging into the trace, I saw it was due to rake loading environment.rb, which fires up [...]

Rails 2.0.2 is coming…

That was fast...
...and now its official.

[ANN] multi_rails 0.0.4 Released

MultiRails lets you test your Rails plugin or app against many versions of Rails in one sweep.
DESCRIPTION:
MultiRails allows easy testing against multiple versions of Rails for your Rails specific gem or plugin. It also has tentative support testing Rails applications against multiple versions of Rails.
Use MultiRails to hook in Rails 2.0 testing in your [...]

Handling asset caching nicely in Rails 2.0

update: fix some incorrect paths that did not have the public in front. (thanks Jon)
From your rails root:
mkdir public/javascripts/cache
mkdir public/stylesheets/cache
svn add public/javascripts/cache/
svn add public/stylesheets/cache/
svn propset svn:ignore '*' public/javascripts/cache/
svn propset svn:ignore '*' public/stylesheets/cache/
svn ci -m "add cache directories for combined assets, but ignore their contents"
Then wherever you are doing the js and css includes:
< %= [...]

Creating a Static Loopback Address to use in VMWare

The problem: you want to be able to always use the same address in VMWare Fusion for your local Mac web server(s), to test IE6 and IE7 with apps as you dev locally. You normally connect via DHCP, so you can't depend on your IP address being constant. You can't use localhost or [...]