Testing

I’m up to my usual using-ruby-tools-to-test-other-environments tricks, using cucumber and my wordpress activerecord classes to do acceptance testing against a highly-customised wordpress install. I’m hoping to write a bit more about that soon, once I’ve put it through its paces a little more and cleaned up some of the code, but I wanted to quickly mention one of the key pain-points and an extremely handy solution. One of the things I enjoy most about testing in rails is the handy tasks to prepare a blank database and the transactions that ensure the database is returned to that state after each test. Obviously that wasn’t going to work cleanly with wordpress since it doesn’t use ActiveRecord, but Matt kindly pointed me in the direction of Ben Mabey’s database_cleaner gem. ...

The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape. ...

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days. ...

As I’ve mentioned here before, when working on web applications built with PHP, whether custom-rolled or drupal-driven, I often find myself missing various tools from the ruby kit. I’ve talked before about using capistrano with non-ruby code, but lately it’s been rspec and its stories that I’ve been craving. I’m aware of PHPSpec and have played with it from time to time, but the lack of a compelling way to work with mocks/stubs has slowed my adoption, and last time I checked it didn’t offer anything for high level user stories. So this week I set out to harness cucumber and webrat to write some simple stories. ...

After returning from a weekend away, updating my apps to the latest Edge Rails, and running my test suite I started spotting new deprecation warnings: DEPRECATION WARNING: assert_flash_exists is deprecated and will be removed from Rails 2.0 DEPRECATION WARNING: assert_flash_has is deprecated and will be removed from Rails 2.0 Kevin Clark has posted on the deprecation of assert_tag in favour of assert_select, but I’ve yet to see any notes on this one. Looking in the actionpack CHANGELOG there’s no reference to the change, and there’s no documentation in the new home of those methods (actionpack/lib/actioncontroller/assertions/deprecated_assertions.rb) to suggest what we should use instead other perhaps than making use of the code used in those methods. eg: ...

Inspired by Sam Ruby’s work on applying the Universal Feed Parser tests to the Ruby FeedTools, I’ve spent a little time this afternoon working on testing XML_Feed_Parser with that same test suite. There’s a lot of work to do! UFP’s tests consist of a series of feed files, some well-formed, and some illformed, with a description and test condition defined at the top of the file. eg. Example description So far all I’ve done is run a script through all the tests for well-formed feeds, testing whether XML_Feed_Parser throws an exception when I try and interpret them. When run against the current CVS, 1181 of the 1273 feeds parsed successfully and 92 failed. 68 of those failures were due to encoding problems (which I’ll try and work around, but won’t be able to cleanly fix until PHP has full unicode support), and another 17 were a result of not supporting CDF, leaving another seven I need to get fixed asap. ...