Lately, I’ve been heavily interested in discussing the process behind software development. Our field is still very young, and I think there’s a lot we can do to improve the way in which we do our jobs.

Slides are below. I described the talk this way: We spend so much time focusing on conventional programming. Everyone focuses on standards, code clarity, testing, and what gems to use. Let’s chat about what’s done before your fingers hit the keys. Let’s talk about brainstorming, requirements, stakeholders, mock-ups, and writing solid user stories and acceptance tests with Cucumber. Every project has a story – how will your next one end?

If you attended the talk, I would love your feedback at SpeakerRate

The Amazon Advertising API allows you to retrieve Amazon catalog data and use it in your application. It can be really handy if you’re participating in the Amazon Associate’s Program

There are a few users of Amazon Associate that might want to know that I’m deprecating the library in favor of ramazon_advertising. Amazon Associate was an older library that I was maintaining. It uses HPricot and really doesn’t jive well from a design standpoint, so amazon_associate is deprecated in favor of ramazon_advertising

Ramazon Advertising uses John Nunemaker’s awesome library happymapper along with nokogiri selectors. It’s much more object oriented and cleaner, so I hope you’ll enjoy using this library.

Right now, it supports product data acquisition via the ItemLookup request. Here’s a simple example where you can find the product data for a given asin:

@products = Ramazon::Product.find(:item_id => "B000NU2CY4", :response_group => "Medium")
@products[0].title
@products[0].asin
@products[0].upc
@products[0].large_image.url
@products[0].url
#you can also use a nokogiri search string to get elements that don't have built-in accessors
@products[0].get("ItemAttributes Actor").collect{|a| a.content}

The ruby gem is available on Gemcutter and the documentation is available at rdoc.info. Patches and feature requests are welcomed!

So without further ado, here’s some tools I found immensely useful in the creation of my rumble app. I’d really like to write a full post mortem, but in the spirit of Friday’s short list of links, here goes:

• SearchLogic – excellent derived named scopes and search form capabilities.
• AuthLogic – my favorite authentication system out their for Rails today.
• Formtastic – a great utility for generating forms quickly.
• Inherited_Resources – Jose has done an awesome job with this helper that handles your typical (and not so typical) RESTful controller actions
• Stringex – useful for permalinking
• under_construction – a handy javascript utility I’ve written to quickly note what design elements need to be implemented from a development standpoint.
• serverjuice – Great for getting an Ubuntu VM up and running quickly
• SpreadHead – although it required some adjustments in the way it handles routes, I really think this is a great way to get a quick CMS integrated with your site. It’s definitely useful to have some editable pieces of your application when there’s a code freeze in 48 hours. I currently use it for CMS partials (a way to have editable content inside a page), but I do not for individual pages themselves. There’s an issue in the gem version where the routes are added to the top of priority instead of the bottom. I’m hoping to help with a fix for this
• tab_menu – I always seem to need tabs or a nice menu system, so I use this code pretty frequently
• ThemeRoller – easily roll JQuery UI styling.

The combination of formtastic, searchlogic, and inherited_resources has really changed the way I code. I think a post on the power of these tools in combination with chronic

Some of these tools and more are available in the Enlightened Template I maintain on Github. There were some updates after the rumble. I hope you find it useful!

The slides are below.

Evan’s blog post with the benchmarks can be found here. There are links to other benchmarks and details.

The process library I alluded to is called God.

Other links

• Thinking Sphinx
• Sphinx
• Delayed Job (for delta indexing)
• Workling Delta Indexer
• Workling
• Starling
• Pat Allen

Let me know what you thought of the talk and the slides. I hope you found it helpful!

I wrote an article about my switch from RSpec to Shoulda. A lot of issues I discussed have been addressed by both teams. Please participate in the discussion about the latest development in test frameworks.

I think it’s really cool that Rails now has a publication. Props to Olimpiu for putting it together.

ActionView::TestCase does not initialize current url so you won’t be able to use *_url and *_path helpers generated from your routes. Put the following lines at the end of your test_helper.rb file to resolve the issue.

class ActionView::TestCase < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  class TestController < ActionController::Base
    attr_accessor :request, :response, :params

    def initialize
      @request = ActionController::TestRequest.new
      @response = ActionController::TestResponse.new
      
      #TestCase doesn't have context of a current url so cheat a bit
      @params = {}
      send(:initialize_current_url)
    end
  end
end

I've submitted a patch to core regarding this. Please +1 for the good of helper_tests!

It was a snap to configure and has a simple plugin you can download once you register. You can add hooks to Lighthouse or other bug tracking software. Not sure how to do this yet, but it’s awesome to see a great execution on an app that solves a problem.

This is how to get it done. On the command line from your Rails project’s root:

  rake spec SPEC_OPTS="--format s -c"

This is a great way to validate a data model in plain English.

Not using RSpec? I highly recommend using it or a comparable framework to use business language as a definition for technical tests. Remember, if you follow Agile methodologies, you’ll want to test before you implement any features.

Are you interested in learning more about Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and RSpec? Check out Peepcode’s screencast.

ActionView::Base.field_error_proc = Proc.new { |html_tag, instance|
"<span class=\"fieldWithErrors\">#{html_tag}</span>" }

Goodbye inappropriate divs!

Ruby on Rails 2.1 – What’s New