Unfortunately, by default plugin tests are pretty bland. They use the plain unit test suite supplied by Ruby, and not any of the extended Rails test framework. This will leave our plugin’s test classes with no access to fixtures, database.yml configuration, or any of those nice class auto-loading features.
A surprisingly large number of plugins have no tests at all. Part of the reason might be that writing a plugin test is a little bit harder than writing a normal unit test.
After 2 1/2 years of blood, sweat, tears, and the occasional Jägermeister, I’m finally officially announcing a project I’ve been quietly working on: state_machine.
Simplifies plugin testing by creating an isolated Rails environment that simulates its usage in a real application
This article is an introduction to testing Rails plugins.
It turned out that the test subject didn't know that longdesc even existed before the tester told him about it. Can you blame him?
Sprockets is a Ruby library that preprocesses and concatenates JavaScript source files. It takes any number of source files and preprocesses them line-by-line in order to build a single concatenation. Specially formatted lines act as directives to the Sprockets preprocessor, telling it to require the contents of another file or library first or to provide a set of asset files (such as images or stylesheets) to the document root.
One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user’s browsing history to estimate age and gender.
Hirb provides a mini view framework for console applications, designed with irb in mind.
Jasmin is an assembler for the Java Virtual Machine. It takes ASCII descriptions of Java classes, written in a simple assembler-like syntax using the Java Virtual Machine instruction set. It converts them into binary Java class files, suitable for loading by a Java runtime system.
Heroku's architecture enables deployment with nothing but Git. Deployment is fast, simple, and just works – all you do is push code to your repo on Heroku.
There are many wonderful things about Rails and the Rails ecosystem. A clean, well-lighted path for keeping all your extensions up to date is not one of them.
Flotr is a javascript plotting library based on the Prototype Javascript Framework (version 1.6.0.2 at the moment) and inspired by Flot (written by Ole Laursen).
Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.
The ability to update and close Trac tickets associated with a given repo whenever a commit is made to that repo is pretty handy. No more committing, going to the Trac site, updating. I found several guides on setting this up floating around, this one being the most informative.
Rails’ script/console makes it easy to fetch, view and edit your database records. But can you edit those records as quickly as you edit code in your text editor? Riiight, like editing our database records in an editor is gonna happen? It already has.
A Rails FormBuilder with semantically rich and accessible markup.