Michael Pearson mipearson

I have an application that, for better or worse, responds in different ways depending on the domain that is used to access it.

Testing this behaviour with rack-test has not been an issue. We use:

When /^I visit the domain "(.*)"$/ do |domain|
  visit "http://#{domain}/"
end

which works as expected: it sets the http_host in the rack request environment and the application responds appropriately.

So far I've been part of four projects and witnessed one that have used Cucumber and automated browser testing (eg selenium). For one reason or another, this has always felt, in retrospect, a waste of time.

I'm going to list the details of the projects here and I'd like others to contribute with their own successes and failures.

I'm doing this as there's a significant contingent in the community who believe that this testing approach is the best way forward. I would like this to be true. Instead, I'm seeing that the toolsets and the knowledge in the community are not mature enough for anything other than simple projects.

This gist was previously about BDD. It's now purely about integration testing using cucumber and using integration tests to drive development. I like BDD as a concept. I have not yet seen it implemented in such a way that made me think the effort was worth the benefit. I think that the current approach and toolsets are to blame for this.

Project 1:

Request for Comments

Fixing Ruby, Python and Node.js packaging on Debian, Redhat and variants.

Canonical URL: http://bit.ly/wtfpackages

It's unfixable.

You shouldn't be using distribution provided packages for your primary language runtime.

I <3 the Asset Pipeline

People talk shit on Sprockets and the Asset Pipeline all the time. I get it. It's pretty confusing and when it breaks it can break in really undesirable ways. I was originally very sceptical, and I strongly considered upgrading to Rails 3.2 with sprockets disabled.

I didn't, and I'm glad I've stuck with the pipeline. Here's why:

If you're using digested assets (by default you are), asset expiry just works. No cache clearing during dev, no "wait a few minutes for the CSS to expire", no expiring every asset on every deploy, no deployment issues where people get new HTML and old CSS or JS. Sprocket's digest strategy has so far been excellent and I'm glad it's there.
SASS and CoffeeScript just work. No running guard or compass to watch and auto-compile your shit, relatively seamless integration into Rails, and effective separation of vendored code from application code.

	%div.clearfix{:class => errors.present? ? 'error' : ''}
	= form.label field
	.input
	= form.send(method, field, *options)
	- if errors.present?
	%span.help-inline= errors


	<body>
	<div id="body">
	.. actual body content goes here, including header/footer/nav/etc ..
	</div>
	<div id="bg1"></div>
	<div id="bg2"></div>
	</body>

	$(document).ready( function() {
	$('.prototype_replacement').bind('ajax:complete', function(event, xhr, status) {
	var updateMe = $($(this).data()['update']);
	if (xhr.getResponseHeader('Content-Type').match("text/javascript")) {
	eval(xhr.responseText);
	} else if(updateMe) {
	updateMe.html(xhr.responseText);
	}
	});

	Mirrored from http://flooble.net/~pete/fuck-you-mysql-you-fucking-fuck-of-a-fuckstick.txt

	mysql> create table fuckyou ( id integer primary key auto_increment, name varchar(20) not null );
	Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

	mysql> insert into fuckyou (name) values (null);
	ERROR 1048 (23000): Column 'name' cannot be null
	mysql> insert into fuckyou (name) values ('pete');
	Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

	{
	"color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme - Default/Solarized (Light).tmTheme",
	"ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true,
	"folder_exclude_patterns":
	[
	".svn",
	".git",
	".hg",
	"CVS",
	".sass-cache",

	create temporary table source_grouped ( group_id int primary key, updated_at datetime);

	insert into source_grouped select group_id, max(updated_at) from source group by group_id where group_id is not null;

	update dest, source_grouped set dest.last_updated_at = source_grouped.updated_at where dest.source_group_id = source_grouped.group_id;