rodmclaughlin.com


Testing

RSPEC is the latest cool thing.
Test::Unit is no longer in. It's like having
a Walkman instead of an iPod.

It's difficult to find out how to use RSpec, or what
it is supposed to do. If you run    
rake rspec
you get all manner of odd messages.
However, I found a good intro to RSpec here:
blog.davidchelimsky.net/articles/2007/05/14/an-introduction-to-rspec-part-i

Create a new model, Person, with nothing in it.
Create spec/models/person_spec.rb and run it:


cat app/models/person.rb class Person end cat ./spec/models/person_spec.rb require File.join( File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', "spec_helper" ) describe Person do it "should be in any roles assigned to it" do end end spec ./spec/models/person_spec.rb --format specdoc Person - should be in any roles assigned to it Finished in 0.012756 seconds 1 example, 0 failures

What puzzled me about test-driven-development
is when you write code you know is wrong, because it's the
simplest thing that will make the test pass:


def in_role?(role) true end

But David Chelimsky explains it perfectly:

'Right now, the only requirement of this system that we’ve expressed is that a “User should be in any roles assigned to it”, and the system meets that requirement. In order to push the code to the next step, we need to express more requirements with more executable examples.'

This is what I ended up with:


$ cat app/models/person.rb class Person def in_role?(role) role == @role end def assign_role(role) @role = role end $ cat spec/models/person_spec.rb require File.join( File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', "spec_helper" ) describe Person do it "should be in any roles assigned to it" do person = Person.new person.assign_role( "assigned role" ) person.should be_in_role("assigned role") end it "should NOT be in any roles not assigned to it" do person = Person.new person.should_not be_in_role("unassigned role") end end $ spec ./spec/models/person_spec.rb --format specdoc Person - should be in any roles assigned to it - should NOT be in any roles not assigned to it Finished in 0.015811 seconds 2 examples, 0 failures


Getting this site up. The people at
railsplayground.com are fantastic.
After deploying the site, I got this rather cryptic message
from one of their tireless elves:
'I have been asked to install merb- gems of version 1.0.1 when run the site...'
It took a lot of googling, installing and uninstalling gems
and changing dependencies.rb to read

merb_gems_version = "1.0.3" dm_gems_version = "0.9.7"

When I tried to set db_gems_version to 0.9.7, this happened:


merb -i Loading init file from /home/kirk/dev/ruby/rubyjunction/config/init.rb ...no such file to load -- do_mysql (LoadError)

and when I set it to 0.9.9, this happened:

merb -i Loading init file from /home/kirk/dev/ruby/rubyjunction/config/init.rb Loading /home/kirk/dev/ruby/rubyjunction/config/environments/development.rb ~ ~ FATAL: The gem dm-core (= 0.9.9, runtime), [] was not found

The solution was to set db_gems_version to 0.9.7 in dependencies.rb
and uninstall datamapper and data_objects version 0.9.9:

$ sudo gem uninstall data_objects -v=0.9.9 $ sudo gem uninstall do_mysql -v=0.9.9 $ merb -i Activating slice 'MerbAuthSlicePassword' ... irb: warn: can't alias context from irb_context. irb(main):001:0>

(That's good, by the way).

The site is now up and running. But you know that.

Added file uploads - see
www.idle-hacking.com/2007/09/scalable-file-uploads-with-merb/
but the internals of controller uploader.rb
are slightly different, and I created folder public/data


class Uploader < Application def index render end def upload FileUtils.mv params[:file][:tempfile].path, Merb.root+"/public/data/#{params[:file][:filename]}" redirect "/uploader" end end

and you need app/views/uploader/index.html.erb:

<p>Upload a new file</p> <form action="/uploader/upload" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <fieldset> <input type="file" name="file" size="80"/> <input type="submit" value="Upload"/> </fieldset> </form>

The next step is to change authentication so
1. I can write on the site
2. Anyone can read it
This was difficult enough in Rails, but more difficult in Merb. The comments in the Merb code are like this:


# Mixin the salted user mixin require 'merb-auth-more/mixins/salted_user'



  <% if session.user %>


means 'if you are logged on' - thanks

singlecell.angryamoeba.co.uk/post/60951656/an-introduction-to-merb-auth-and-the-wonderful-secrets

 

Now I've done the site in Merb. This shows I am a Ruby developer, since Merb is difficult. All the documentation is just plain wrong, etc.. Fortunately, Merb is being taken over by the Ruby on Rails team, whose motto is "Web development that doesn't hurt". What I meant to say is the two teams are merging.

So the next plan is to move the site from Merb to Rails. I will document the process of doing this for the edification of others.