B’more on Rails synopsis – April 2010

B’more on Rails is a community of Baltimore folks who use the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails application framework. Check out our MeetUp page. Below is a brief synopsis from our April 2010 meetup. You can also download the slides here.

Bundler is great for gem management. Among other things, it solves the issue where gems are required to load your environment but the environment needs to be loaded for the bootstrapping code that installs those gems to execute.

Cucumber seems to be the most agile solution for BDD style integration tests. Writing out the features before you write code seems like a lot of work, but it will yield better productivity as it forces you to keep the business requirement paramount during development. It’s overkill for unit tests in which case RSpec, Shoulda, or TestUnit (shipped with Rails) will serve you well. Also, it can be quite painful at first, but the key is to start simple and you will be naturally drawn to advanced usage.

Cucumber should be used in conjunction with Capybara or Webrat for browser simulation. Also the following testing tools were mentioned:

• Email-spec: a great way to test emails with Cucumber
• Pickle: great Cucumber steps for creating your models
• Factory Girl: fixtures replacement (use in conjunction with Pickle)
• Timecop: travel time for time-dependent tests (cucumber usage here)
• Friendly ID: more friendly (readable) references to your model

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