Bunk and Rambling

A few months back, I converted a large set of ruby selenium tests to using selenium-rc and rspec. Unfortunately the changes didn’t stick, mainly due to a lack of ruby debugging support in our primary development environment, Intellij 6. The idea has stayed at the forefront of my mind since that time and it was great to stumble upon Kerry Buckley’s blog on selenium-rc and rbehave. In my opinion, the type of approach to testing that he discusses is an absolute necessity if we expect automated functional testing to go mainstream.

It looks like JetBrains are working on an open source Rails plug-in for the next release of IntelliJ. This sounds like it could be good news, but I think it is best to refrain from hailing this as a great new feature for IntelliJ until I see it in action.

I am very excited to see that Typo 4.0.0 has just been released. Congratulations to the Typo team on getting this out and thanks for all the hard work.

Hopefully I will have this site up and running this new version over the next few days after running it through its paces at home.

By the way, I am back from my three week vacation. More on that shortly.

Having absolutely no spare time on my hands at all I thought it would be the right time to have a look into Ruby on Rails in a little more depth than I have done previously. The only way that this is possible is to actually get down and dirty and start writing some actual Ruby code.

Since I have all this free time on my hands, I figured it would also be worthwhile to do a little research into a reasonable Ruby editor (other than Vim of course). So far my search has lead me to RadRails.

RadRails is built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). Being an Eclipse user for a number of years on my Java projects, I figured I would try and use the RadRails Eclipse plug-in rather than download the full development environment. While the installation went without incident (after having installed InstantRails first) I have had some problems with creating a project within my regular Eclipse environment. Due to the time factor, I haven’t had a chance to work out why this is happening just yet (but will do so when time is on my side again). As a result, I ended up downloading the full RadRails IDE and running it alongside my current Eclipse installation. This seems to make all the difference at present and based on first impressions, the IDE was worth the time take to download it. I would highly recommend checking this out if you have any interest in Rails development, especially on Windows.

I will keep you posted on what comes out of this, if anything.

Initially based upon a desire to explore Ruby on Rails beyond its famous 15 minute presentation, I have selected Typo for my blog software. Having spent a small amount of time working with it in my test environment I have come to the conclusion that it is more than sufficient for this site.

While it is early days for Typo, I have been impressed with the simple administration interface that it provides. There are a number of interactive elements such as the drag and drop controls for the side bar content that are an improvement over systems that I have used in the past. Having had my fair share Javascript experience, I find myself appreciative of the effort that goes into constructing this type of functionality for the web. Looking into the system a little further however highlights the use of Javascript libraries such as Prototype and Script.aculo.us to deliver some key parts of this functionality. These libraries seem to have some affinity with Ruby on Rails, which I think is another reason why Rails seems to be getting the attention that it is. Beyond the simple development structure that it puts in place, the developers appear to understand the needs of their users to construct interactive sites in an efficient manner. By aligning themselves with interactive web functionality made easier through these Javascript libraries the association between Rails and Web 2.0 is enhanced to a point that should ensure Rails’ continued growth to the detriment of other web platforms over coming months. Whatever really happens, this is certainly a space to watch as other platforms begin to emulate Rails.

Back on the Typo front though, I think it is worthwhile to point out that the theme support for Typo is also reasonable on first approach and that there are a number of pre-built themes that are worthwhile looking over at typogarden.com for those of you who are interested. Be careful however, some themes only provide support for trunk releases of Typo. My suggestion, as I have done here, is to use a basic theme that supports the latest stable release before exploring trunk versions.