PLANET RUBY ON RAILS

Doing Test Driven Development (TDD) effectively is not something that comes easy, even when you’re working with a well structured Rails application. Up until March of this year there really was no guide I could recommend for developers who wanted to learn TDD with Rails.

What happened in March? Noel Rappin released his Rails Test Prescriptions PDF guide. You can start out by reading his FREE 84 page Getting Started With Rails Testing PDF Guide, and then maybe upgrade to his $9 dollar 286 page guide which covers advanced topics like creating Test helpers, stubbing, mocking, and even how to use factories, shoulda, rspec, and cucumber.

Noel is a great teacher providing examples that are really easy to follow and code downloads if you want to try writing tests on your own. So if you’re not doing testing yet or you want to learn some best practices, definitely check out Rails Prescriptions.

It’s also worth mentioning that Noel has posted some pretty interesting blog posts on the Rails Prescriptions Blog going over a few testing topics and even some testing interviews with developers like Chad Fowler, James Golick, Ryan Bates, and Mike Gunderloy. Lastly I can’t talk about Noel without mentioning his contributions to the Pathfinder blog, I’m a big fan of his blog posts.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

I asked those present to share an open source project of theirs. Here are a few:

• simple_gate – A Ruby library for using net/ssh/gateway’s capabilities in a simple to use way.
• surf – A simple CouchDB mapper written in Scala
• ubuntu-machine – Capistrano recipes which allow you to setup a machine running Ubuntu Server 8.0.4 or 8.1.
• active_record_like – Make your ActiveRecords come from XML, LDAP, Memcache or even C# libraries!
• ico – A JavaScript graph library based on Raphael by Wakoopa.

If you want to know if your application can scale before it actually gets the traffic spike, then you need to learn how to do Load Testing. Thankfully I just released Load Testing – Part 2 of the Scaling Rails screencast series. If you haven’t seen the first video on Load Testing, you should probably start there.

Load Testing – Part 2

Summary

In this second Load Testing Screencast we pickup where we left off with the first load testing screencast and learn how to use httperf load testing with sessions, how to automate our httperf testing using autobench, how to graph the results from autobench, and lastly we talk briefly about a few other load testing tools you might want to be aware of.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the screencast RSS feed or grab it on ITunes to avoid missing any of these episodes. FYI, These videos look great on an iPhone / iPod if you want something to watch on the go.

Show us yours!

I’m in Amsterdam for Kings of Code (which was awesome) and will be at Cafe de Jaren Thursday (the 2nd) at 8pm.

Stop by and have a drink if you’re in the neighborhood!

Not sure who to look for? Check the BusinessWeek photo (I’m on the right).

Recently I put together a video for the guys over at Webbynode. Webbynode is a very affordable VPS host (256 RAM for $15) which has great support for Rails applications. Why should you consider using Webbynode? Just watch the video.

Back in the early days of Rails you could find cheap hosting plans that gave you great Rails support. Since then it’s become harder to find middle ground between shared hosting on Dreamhost and managed hosting on Rails Machine or Engine Yard. A few months ago I was lucky enough to run into Carlos Taborda, who was just launching the beta of Webbynode. I decided to give Webbynode a try to run the Ruby Hero Awards.

Since then I’ve been really impressed by the progress made by the Webbynode team, and I think they’ve created an awesome product for the Rails community. Why have they impressed me?

• Rails Support – I love the idea that if I run into trouble on my Webbynode VPS, I can go direct to a Campfire room or IRC and get helpful support. This is so important when you find yourself troubleshooting an issue for hours, and need a little extra help.
• Readystacks – Readystacks allow developers who don’t have experience with system administration to very quickly get up and running with a Rails server. Just like Rails scaffolding is a great starting point for an app, Readystacks serve as a great starting point for a VPS setup. Back in the day RailsMachine had their “5 minute deploy” script which was cool, but Webbynode did it one step better by providing an easy to use web interface that kicks ass.
• Full Access – Like I said before, Readystacks are great starting points, but nothing beats having full and complete (root) ssh access to configure your servers. I just can’t imagine deploying a client’s application on a production box without it, and Webbynode gives you the keys to the castle.

So, check out the video, and maybe next time you need another VPS, give Webbynode a try.

Welcome back to Rebase! Want your project featured? Check out the guidelines and remember: the more information on your README/project page the better!

Featured Project

blue-ridge is a no-hassle JavaScript testing framework. Built on the same principles as Rails such as Convention over Configuration, this combines the power of Rhino, Screw.Unit, Smoke, and env.js so you can test the core logic behind your JS without having to deal with a browser. This is built right into your Rails testing framework of choice, and it even has an interactive console so you can debug your code instead of using a tool like Firebug. By default it assumes you’re using jQuery, but Prototype can be swapped in with barely any effort. Check out this great blog post to see how to get started, and browse around a sample application to see it in action.

Notably New Projects

PNGSquash is for those who love OSX apps and smaller images. Save some bandwidth and some frustration by allowing this app to crush your PNGs for you. Pick from your favorite algorithm for shaving bytes off images such as PNGCrush or OptiPNG to literally squash those bits down. Download the app here if you’d like to try it out.

loli is a Haskell web development DSL inspired by Sinatra that can run on Hack (which is based on Rack). This is a neat way to express a web application that’s both classy and extremely functional. It’s already got some great view template support, including Rails-inspired partials and layouts.

v8-gl fuses the ubiquitious graphics engine, OpenGL, with the speed demon of a JavaScript interpreter, v8. The result is that you can code graphical apps in JS instead of C/C++. This project aims to be a full toolkit, but right now it’s just getting the bindings down so everything is possible in pure JS. The progress so far looks pretty stunning, and I’m sure this project could use your help if you’re of the graphical/gaming type.

bananajour is a wacky name for a slick interface to Git repositories served up over Bonjour. Think of this like gitjour, but with a really nice web application on top of it. Why is this useful? Well, if you happen to be attending certain gatherings without internet access, this is a great way to share your code. If you can’t connect to GitHub, this looks like your best option to get your Git on.

Palette is little Python project that uses the Python Imaging Library to create a color map of any picture. The most interesting visualization it can create is a ‘star’ color wheel, where the length of the ray is proportional to the hue. Here’s what it looks like for our dear friend the Octocat. This could be a neat little project to hack on if you’re new to Python and would like something a bit visual to hack on.

Learn two different techniques for parsing an RSS feed using Feedzirra in this episode!

Yesterday you pushed 17,160 times to GitHub for a total of 44,287 unique commits.

You also pushed an additional 9,577 non-unique commits.

Thanks.