ShRUG 4 – March 2010
Cucumber-Rails and RSpec
With Cucumber-Rails and RSpec 2.0.0.beta.2 it seems like most Rails 3 support is in place. A few of us are trying it out.
Rails 3 takes ages to load!
We had a discussion around how fast RSpec runs in Ruby 1.9, which then led to the fact that the bottleneck in using RSpec with Rails 3 is the web server takes an age to boot. Spork was suggested (by James or Jon, I think) as a possible solution, but nobody at ShRUG had tried it with Ruby 1.9 and/or RSpec 2.
Aruba
Spun out of work done to get Cucumber-Rails working on Rails 3, Aslak Hellesøy’s Aruba is a set of Cucumber steps to test command-line applications. It includes support for RVM, so you can switch between Ruby versions and gemsets too.
Bundler
More discussion on Bundler, which is becoming a regular topic. Jon pointed out there’s now a bundler08 gem for people that can’t update to the 0.9 series. Debate raged around whether the bundle command should install to ~/.bundle or to $GEM_HOME. Bundler issue 45 goes into more detail.
Heroku stacks public beta
Heroku stacks , which give you the ability to run Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1, is now in public beta.
RVM and Pik
We talked about how RVM to manage Ruby installations on Unix-like systems, although there are apparently issues with Ubuntu. Steve pointed us at Pik – a Ruby version manager for Windows.
Whenever
Whenever is a gem for managing cron tasks. Looks pretty handy if you have scheduled tasks to run on a self-managed server. Another find by Steve – I think.
Sammy
Sammy a JavaScript framework built on jQuery that aims to implement Sinatra in the browser. John Nunemaker has written a simple TODO app called Trucker that uses it. Another find by Steve.
Jesus
Someone pointed out that server monitoring tool God has a web front end called Jesus
No one was smitten by lightning while laughing at the name, proof that the gods above need some God loving. Possibly.
FubuMVC
Steve highlighted FubuMVC an example of the Front Controller design pattern for web frameworks. It must be hard for Steve to find time to do work in between researching code projects :)