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Walk-Through Test Coverage
This week, I wrote up a little Rake task to improve coverage reporting by doing what I'm calling "walk-through" coverage testing. To explain what I mean, let met give an example.
I'm adding a new feature to my Rails app. In the finest tradition of Test-Driven Development, I start with a test. Something like this:
should "correctly associate a new address with the current user" do login_as :john_q_public put :update, :address => {:street => "123 Sesame", :zip => 00001} assert_response :success assert_equal ("123 Sesame", users(:john_q_public).address.street) assert_equal ("NY", users(:john_q_public).address.state) end
Topics: Ruby on Rails
Where minimalism fails: The problem with Apple’s less-is-more approach
So I'm watching the big Apple notebook event and getting totally excited about the impressive new graphics capabilities. Finally I'll be able to get decent visuals on World of Warcraft on a Mac laptop. Then we get to the part about the new trackpads and my excitement wanes. Once again, Apple is opting for ultra-minimalist hardware and then using software to compensate (poorly) for that design choice.
Here's Steve Jobs:
We've got a new trackpad for notebooks. It's a gorgeous, large, multitouch glass trackpad for notebooks. It's 39 percent larger tracking area than before, it's multi-touch for gestures, it's glass for silky-smooth travel. And we've optimized the coefficient of friction on the glass, so it's really beautiful. And the entire trackpad is the button. It gives you more area on the trackpad and keeps you from hunting for that button. You can get multi-button support from software. And we've added some new four-finger gestures that are really nice.
Four-finger gestures may be really nice, but I'd opt for two hardware buttons any day. Whether you're playing video games or simply using productivity and development apps, you should be able to summon context menus without having to resort to arcane gestures. Apple's obsession with scaling hardware down to its essence may result in beautiful products, but usability almost always suffers. Need some more examples?
Roles Testing For Security
Every web site that has some concept of user login also has some concept of user roles. Administrators have special editing access or behind the scenes report views. Users with different relationships have different ability to view the other user's data, and so on. In my experience, every site's requirements along this line are just different enough that a one-size-fits all plugin approach to roles never quite works.
That said, there are some common principles that I've found helpful in implementing roles and security.
Topics: Ruby on Rails
Blackbird takes the pain out of JavaScript logging
I'm excited to announce the arrival of Blackbird, an open-source JavaScript logging and profiling utility written by G. Scott Olson, a former colleague from my days at Orbitz Worldwide.
A previous iteration of Blackbird provided no-nonsense, cross-browser logging on a variety of projects within Orbitz. Since that iteration, known as jsLogger, Scott has re-written the code from the ground up; provided tons of useful new features, including custom namespacing and a spiffy new graphical interface; and released it under an MIT license.
Why, you might ask, in the age of Firebug, would anybody need a JavaScript logging utility? Simple:
- Blackbird works in a wide variety of modern browsers. Write one style of log statement for every browser.
- Blackbird can be deployed to production. By stubbing out its public API with empty functions, you can leave your log statements in production code. (I'm not endorsing this approach to code maintenance, just pointing out that Blackbird makes it easy.)
- Blackbird does one thing and does it well. It's not a debugger, it's just a logger and profiler.
- Blackbird doesn't interfere with Firebug's
console.logutility, but it does improve on its interface. You can hide or show the Blackbird modal with a single, customizable keystroke. You can also choose from four levels of logging (debug, info, warning and error) and atomically toggle their visibility within the console.
The Blackbird project now lives at Google Code, where you can download it and learn about how to contribute.
Topics: Ajax, Javascript, Javascript Libraries, logging, Open Source
Making GWT JSON not Quite so Painful
I've been using GWT to resurface interfaces of a variety of legacy applications -- J2EE, PHP, Rails -- and more often than not that means working with JSON returned from the server. One thing that I've found is that GWT's JSON support is kind of chatty. That is, you have to write a bunch of code like this:
JSONValue root = JSONParser.parse(json); JSONObject obj = root.isObject(); if (obj != null) { JSONValue map = obj.get("map"); if (map != null) { JSONArray arr = map.isArray(); if (arr != null) { if (arr.size() > 1) { JSONValue strval = arr.get(1); if (strval != null) { JSONString str = strval.isString(); if (str != null) { String s = str.stringValue(); // do something with the string } } } } } }
Yikes! Just to get the string in the second array item in the "map" key of the top level object. Truth is, most of the JSON I'm getting back is fairly predictable. And if it's not in that predictable form, it's an error that the client code can't recover from. I'd like to be able to write something like String result = obj.get("map").get(1).stringValue() without having to worry about NullPointerException's cropping up all over the place.
HTML5, Ajax history management, and The Ajax Experience 2008 Boston
The Ajax Experience last week in Boston yielded lots of exciting developments on the Ajax history management front:
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My talk itself drew a crowd of 110 people or so despite its 8.10 a.m. start time. I received good questions from the audience and didn't notice too many people heading for the doors when they realized how deep into the nitty-gritty technical details I was getting. Instead of using Keynote or Powerpoint for my slides, I built a basic DHTML application. That way, one artifact could serve as both my content and a demo of Really Simply History, the Ajax history and back-button library I maintain. You can view the application - and the slides - at Pathfinder Labs.
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I did not meet my goal of releasing an alpha of Really Simple History 0.8 in conjunction with the conference. But I did accomplish a ton of work on the library during the build-up to my talk. I'm now hard at work finalizing the alpha and preparing updates to the project's Google Code-hosted homepage.
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The most exciting Ajax history development was the face time I enjoyed with Nathan Hammond, creator of JavaScript State Manager (JSSM), and Brad Neuberg, original creator of Really Simple History. After my talk we enjoyed an impromptu Ajax back-button summit and hammered out a shared agenda for the future of both my library and the topic in general. I'm pleased to announce that Nathan will be coming on as an RSH co-maintainer with the goal of merging RSH 0.8 and JSSM into a single, stable 1.0 library. I'm also excited that Brad, Nathan and I - plus other authors of Ajax history libraries who wish to participate - will be issuing a position paper on the current history implementation in the HTML 5 spec. Ajax history experts, please contact me via Pathfinder if you want to weigh in.
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As for the conference itself, it was my first time attending The Ajax Experience and I really enjoyed it. The topics were many, varied and well-presented. My favorites included Douglas Crockford's discussion of JavaScript's good parts, which could have been a simple book promo but turned out to be far more; the panel discussion between the leaders of YUI, Dojo, jQuery and Prototype moderated by the inimitable PPK; and my colleage Dietrich's un-sexy but vital look at how to resurface J2EE apps for Ajax using the Google Web Toolkit.
I have to say, the crowd here felt like my tribe. The guys running around with the word "JavaScript" shaved into their hair put a smile on my face. Ajax developers are often third-class citizens at other conferences. They're either jammed together with designers and user experience folks, or thrown into the midst of Java and Ruby developers. That wasn't the case here, and I dug it highly.
My least favorite aspect of the conference had nothing to do with the crowd or the content; it was the depressing lack of vegan food. One meal was 90% vegan, but most were 0%. Given the conference center's distance from civilization, it would have been nice if attendees' diverse dietary needs had been taken into consideration. On the plus side, I think I lost five pounds.
Many thanks to the folks from Tech Target for the awesome speaker support. My name, so amusingly misspelled on the monitor outside the ballroom where I spoke, had been corrected by the time I took the podium.
And special thanks to Ben, Dion and everyone at Ajaxian for throwing such a jam-packed event, letting me speak at it, and doing so much for the Ajax community over the years.
A Look Back At Past Posts
Updates to past posts:
TankEngine
Thanks to Gregg and Jason at RailsEnvy for mentioning TankEngine on their podcast. The git repository now has 54 watchers and 3 forks. Thanks, everybody who is watching. I'm hoping for some updates soon.
Plugin testing
This is always what I'm afraid of, I write a big post on something, then a commenter points out a plugin that already does it reasonably well. In this case, the commenter mentioned the plugin_test_helper library, which allows you to pretty easily include a Rails environment inside your plugin for testing. The only problem I had with it is that if you have an actual application has this plugin installed, it seems to do odd things to the environment load -- I wound up limiting the init.rb of the plugin to only do something if the RAILS_ENV was specifically set to test plugins.
Topics: Ruby on Rails
Flash Player on iPhone gossip
First thing that came to my mind when I initially heard about the iPhone was the multi-touch possibilities that would start changing the way we create Flash/Flex interfaces (hopefully through SDK extension supporting multi-touch on Adobe's side triggered by iPhone release).
It looked very promising and natural to me in the beginning that this will be the route. Flash is a great part of the Internet experience and iPhone is a great mobile device for, among other things, Internet access.
Topics: Flash, flash player, Flex, iPhone
Microsoft to Jump on Board EC2
Hold on to your hats; Microsoft has just made a radical change in business model. A couple of months ago I wrote about the competitive advantage that firms using Linux and Amazon's EC2 cloud computing had over their competitors.
Server-on-demand providers like Amazon's EC2, Joyent,
and others have reduced the capital necessary to launch scalable,
server intensive businesses. Google has just launched a similar
on-demand service, and companies like RightScale and CohesiveFT are building mature businesses around managing EC2 configurations....
Facebook applications are just the most extreme example of business initiatives that can be scaled on demand from $70/month on one EC2 server to $10,000/month on many dozens of servers running web, application and database server clusters and farms. Compare that with the old school of investing in a large data center with a significant fraction of the hardware and bandwidth that you might need if your business is a success. What used to cost $100k in capital can now be done with just a few hundreds of dollars.
...
And it's all possible as long as you are using a unix variant - Linux for the most part - to power your apps. So there is a whole class of companies out there using Linux that can out compete their Windows-using rivals - again, the capital they need to launch is much smaller because of cloud computing. That means Linux will win among the class of young entrepreneurial businesses that are so vital to the US economy.
TAE Boston 2008: The Unsexy Presentations
Lets face it, most people come to Ajax conference for the eye candy. TAE Boston 2008 is no different, and the jQuery, Dojo and other sessions are packed. That's great. I love good eyecandy. But the shame is that many folks skip the less sexy presentations, such as today's presentation by Ted Husted entitle Ajax Testing Tool Review. Talks like these and the tools and methods they discuss is what is leading to the "professionalisation" of front end development, as my colleague Brian Dillard likes to say.
Some of the highlights from Ted's talk:
- If you like CruiseControl, but it's too fiddly for you, you'll love Hudson, a much more user friendly continuous integration engine.
- The Selenium IDE is great for getting started or smoke testing, but use the API's (in Java, C#, Ruby, etc.) to get real, supportable unit tests done.
- YUI Test is intrusive, but it overcomes some of the shortcomings for testing asynchronous events that are present in JsUnit and Selenium. See Ted's post on YUI Test.
OK, not sexy, but if you want to develop quality software, you have to keep an eye on the non-sexy bits.
Topics: CruiseControl, Hudson, JsUnit, Test Driven Development, YUI
The Ajax Experience 2008: Hope to see you in Beantown
I'm posting today from Boston, where my colleague Dietrich Kappe and I are proud to be presenting at The Ajax Experience 2008.
At 5.10 p.m. tomorrow (Tuesday 30 September), Dietrich will present "Saving Your Investment: Transforming J2EE Applications into Web 2.0 Using GWT." This 90-minute session will introduce noobs to the Google Web Toolkit; school experienced GWT developers in the security implications of leaky client-side business logic; and delight business folks and bean-counters alike with the money-savings possibilities of retrofitting a legacy webapp instead of building a new one from scratch.
At 8.10 a.m. the following day (Wednesday 1 October), I will present "Making Friends with the Browser: Ajax, Back Buttons and Bookmarks." In it, I'll look at the state of Ajax history management, from new libraries such as the JavaScript State Manager and dsHistory to my own project, Really Simple History. I'll discuss the problems and tradeoffs inherent in any browser history manager. I'll also examine the impact of new browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on this small, rapidly evolving corner of the Ajax world.
We look forward to seeing some of you there and reporting back about the rest of the conference.
Topics: Ajax, Ajax Experience, events, Javascript
TankEngine: New plugin for Rails iPhone Development
Last Saturday at Windy City Rails, I had the pleasure of announcing TankEngine, a new Rails plugin for targeting iPhone and Mobile Safari. ("git" it here)
Now, I know, I've done this already, so why a brand-new version of the plugin with a new name?
Good question. The original plugin was basically a wrapper around the iUI JavaScript and CSS classes. After working with iUI for a while, it turned out that I had a few differences of opinion with iUI (which I still think is a very nice piece of work).
Continue reading »
Topics: iPhone, Ruby on Rails
Symphony of Ruby on Rails and Flex through RubyAMF
In a project that I am currently a part of, we inherited Ruby on Rails from our client's system and project front-end was designated to be developed in Flex. RubyAMF came naturally.
I have been working with two other AMF frameworks prior to this: AMFPHP and WebOrb. My experience with both was that they are fairly hard to set up and once you go through that minefield, everything works excellent. No need to say that I am a great advocate of AMF in general. RubyAMF brings the same good old AMF but with a stunning ease and speed of development!
My colleague working on the Ruby side, Justin Ficke, introduced me to code and architecture of Ruby on Rails and I was impressed to see with what ease, precision and speed can one develop it.
Justin and I put a little test together of this architecture and here is a screen cast of it.
All the lovely custom typed objects and speed of data transfer are there. Beauty of it, appart from obvious benefits from AMF, is that the development process couldn't have been better and faster.
Topics: amf, AS3, Flex, Ruby on Rails, rubyamf
“Build half a product, not a half-assed product” - tips on clarity and focus from Jason Fried of 37Signals
Jason Fried from 37Signals spoke yesterday at the ITA "Speaking of Success" event, about the history of 37Signals, their philosophy and culture, and the critical business decisions they've made to get them where they are today.
The software biz is fundamentally broken. Too many products fail because of the obsession of adding more and more, and trying to do too much.
Jason went on to say that the approach of adding more and more only works for companies that have lots of money and lots of time, but that for the average company the main goal should be to build something that is "good enough," get it out to the users, and improve the design based on their feedback. The challenge of which features to include, and which to say "No" to, is covered well in the "The Innovator's Dilemma," which he said "everyone in this room should have read." The book resonates the core philosophy of 37Signals, which is evident from their blogs, their book "Getting Real," and the design of the Rails framework. As an example of the "Good Enough" philosophy, Jason used his laptop and its basic webcam to stream the Q&A session out over justin.tv and send out a text to the 37signals Twitter group. "The quality probably isn't that great, but its good enough," and with that quick setup he had now broadened the audience by 1,000 users or so. (I searched for the video archive at justin.tv, but didn't find it yet.)
Rails Performance, Code Metrics, and Locking Down your Application: Tips & Tricks from Windy City Rails 2008
Windy City Rails was the best Rails conference I've ever been to, which is easy for me to say since it was my first actual Rails conference. But even speaking from a fairly uninformed point of view I found it very full of quality. In case you didn't know, it was created by ChicagoRuby, sponsored by Pathfinder (us) among others, and you can find tons more details if you're interested at http://windycityrails.org/. Anyway, it was this last Saturday the 20th, and after four days of digestion I am prepared to deliver some of the highlights:
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- Where minimalism fails: The problem with Apple’s less-is-more approach
- jQuery goodness with ASP .NET
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- Roles Testing For Security
- Blackbird takes the pain out of JavaScript logging
- Making GWT JSON not Quite so Painful
- IDEA - preconference workshop 06 Oct 08
- HTML5, Ajax history management, and The Ajax Experience 2008 Boston
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