February 2009
11 posts
6 tags
Forbidden kisses & HTTP fluency in Clearance
UPDATE: After about two years of using this approach in Clearance, we removed the 403 Forbidden feature in Clearance. We discovered that setting the 403 status code turned out to be a bad user experience in some browsers such as Chrome on Windows machines. Philosophically, we decided we value user experience over technical purity.
Clearance tries to be fluent in HTTP. That means a few...
Mixing Cucumber with Test::Unit/Shoulda
I don’t know if cucumber is a fruit or vegetable
There’s a lot of buzz in the community right now about the latest framework for top-down BDD: Cucumber . Cucumber lets you describe features in plain text, from a user’s perspective. Once you have your thoughts down in English (or another language), you can map each “step” of your spec to Ruby code. This perfectly complements our love of...
factory_girl 1.2: adding excitement to stale...
Some like it hot
The factory_girl syntax was designed to balance best practices, consistency, readability, and brevity, and to handle all of the features we wanted to support. However, users haven’t been shy to point out that not everybody is a fan of our factory flavor.
If you think mixing in some factory_girl would be good for your project, but don’t care much for the taste, you can try out...
4 tags
Widgetfinger: Versioning and Google Apps Support...
We’ve rolled out a few updates to Widgetfinger, our simple content management system for simple websites, and we wanted to tell you about them.
Content Versioning
The biggest change is that you can now review and compare past revisions to your content.
The special treat here is that we’ve actually been tracking every change since Widgetfinger launched last year. When building...
6 tags
Umbrella Today in your email
Following up on last week’s historic announcement that Umbrella Today supports international areas and geocoding, we have another update today — Umbrella Today now has email notification support as well.
This was our next most requested feature after international support. We built Umbrella Today as part of the creation of materials for our Ruby training courses, and one of the original...
13 tags
yiloveit
We’re feeling particularly proud of our training alumni this evening.
Jeff Mehlhoff recently completed our Beginning Rails training class. On his way home to Florida, he wrote yiloveit.com. It was the first time he had used Test-Driven Development to write a Rails app.
Although it only has one model and one controller, it’s an impressive app.
From Jeff:
100% test coverage using...
6 tags
Happy Umbrella Day!
If you’re at all like us, you’ve spent the last few months of your life anticipating one of the truly great holidays in the world: Umbrella Day. This year, as the people behind the internet’s leading umbrella notification service — Umbrella Today — the holiday sort of takes on a special meaning for us, and it’s time to give the site some long overdue love.
International support
Our...
19 tags
Clearance: Rails authentication for developers who...
Authentication is a common pattern in Rails apps. Thus, there have been many authentication plugins. We’ve tried acts_as_authenticated and restful_authentication over the years.
We found that user authentication is hard to generalize. Most abstracted authentication plugins had both too much and too little for us.
We then tried writing authentication from scratch on our clients’ Rails apps...
10 tags
Our office, your office
We’ve trained 78 developers in Ruby on Rails in the past five months. The design of the classes have evolved such that Rails & agile are now highly coupled.
Working software delivered frequently
During last week’s two-day class, we ran 25 short workshops during which students wrote a blog, the web app developer’s rite of passage.
Face-to-face conversation is the best form of...
5 tags
The Hoptoad Database is Friggen Huge
As of today, Hoptoad has processed over 28 million errors. As those of your who use Hoptoad may know, we store the full details of not only the exception that occurred, including the backtrace, but also the full application session, request data, and server environment – forever.
This has caused the Hoptoad database to rapidly grow to about 300GB, and its still growing. We’re currently...
5 tags
Speculating with Shoulda
Shoulda used RSpec?
Shoulda’s users have long enjoyed the brevity and simple, declaritive nature of macros. These test-generating methods cut the most common ActiveRecord and ActionPack tests down to one beautiful, readable line. However, it doesn’t seem fair in this time of unity to leave our RSpec brothers and sisters out in the cold. If you like RSpec and Shoulda, but would just as soon...