RubySIG notes, 25-Sept-2007: Scott Garmin and Nick Plante: Live Coding Session

[Ted Roche]

Five attendees made it to the September meeting of the NH Ruby/Rails
User Group [1] , held as usual at the well-appointed RMC Research [2]
offices, though not on the usual third Tuesday. A round of introductions
lead to some vigorous discussions, including how to broadcast and record
meetings (perhaps a future meeting will be available via WebEx?), other
computing organizations and conferences in the Granite State (GNHLUG,
SwANH, the infoeXchange conference, NH High-Tech Council, etc.).

Nick Plante had some great stories about the Rails Rumble [3], a 48-hour
online programming contest he help run. A large number of teams competed
and a fair number actually delivered working applications, some of them
looking quite polished. There's open voting on the most popular
applications, and winners will walk away with a number of desirable
prizes. Nick's also been tapped to do the closing presentation at Ruby
East [4], where he will demonstrate some of the more popular
applications. There are some great apps there, and some will be
providing their source code, though not all. Check them out!

On to the main presentation: Scott and Nick had started a simple Ruby
app for NHRuby members to be able to suggest future meeting topics and
vote on them, giving the organizers some ideas on what to present next.
Tonight, Scott presented the unit, functional and integration test
frameworks built into Rails and/or available as add-ons. Nick showed the
UI for the voting interface and dove deep into how the form functioned.
There was a lot of discussion, with debates on where the boundaries are
in unit vs. functional vs. integration, and how Javascript (via the
Prototype libraries) can be integrated into the interface and how Rails
allows graceful degradation on platforms with Javascript unavailable or
disabled. Comparisons were made between the internal, programmer-centric
tests provided by Rails and external tests a QA person might run with a
tool like Selenium [5]. Lots and lots of great ideas. In a future
meeting, Scott and Nick will discuss the next step, deploying the
application, perhaps using Vlad the Deployer (ow) [6] and/or the new
Capistrano 2 [7].

Thanks to Scott for organizing the meeting, Tim of RMC for providing the
meeting space, Scott and Nick for the presentation, Brian for mentioning
Selenium and all for their attendance and participation!


[1] http://wiki.nhruby.org/index.php/Main_Page
[2] http://www.rmcportsmouth.com/
[3] http://www.railsrumble.com/
[4] http://www.ruby-east.com/rubyeast/
[5] http://www.openqa.org/selenium/
[6] http://rubyhitsquad.com/Vlad_the_Deployer.html
[7] http://www.capify.org/

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com