Merb Gem Cleanup

November 25th, 2009 • DataMapper, Merb, OS X, Ruby, programming

It seems to be a common issue for us Merbists, who depend on multiple Gems for merb to play nicely to get into a bit of a mess as gems are updated.

So, at times a cleanup is in order. Here is what i’ve done to cleanup my merb setup:

$ sudo gem update --system
$ gem search --no-version merb | grep merb | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of merb
$ gem search --no-version dm | grep dm | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of data_mapper
$ gem search --no-version data_objects | grep data_objects | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of data_objects
$ sudo gem sources -c
$ sudo rm PATH_TO_GEMS/cache/merb* # PATH_TO_GEMS is the path to your rubygems install.  Mine is /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
$ sudo rm PATH_TO_GEMS/cache/dm*
$ sudo gem install -r merb

This was taken from the meb installation instructions at: http://wiki.merbivore.com/howto/installation/gems

Using Cucumber, Webrat and Selenium to test ajax form field validations

September 4th, 2009 • 2 comments Cucumber, Internet, JavaScript, Merb, Ruby, Webrat, programming

I have an app that fires an ajax request on a form field to validate its contents when I take focus off the field.

I am also using Cucumber, Webrat and Selenium for my integration tests.

I needed my integration tests to test the Ajax responses and the tests weren’t receiving a response from the Ajax requests.

The Problem

I found that by simply completing the web form, the ajax request was not being fired and my test was therefore failing when i checked for the existance of the Ajax response. It soon became clear that selenium doesn’t really interact with the form in the sense of selecting fields and entering values; It simply enters values. As such, the Ajax request was not firing and my test was failing.

The Solution

The solution is Selenium’s fireEvent method, which you can pass a form field id and the blur method:

selenium_session.fireEvent(”field”, “blur”);

In Webrat, this is ever simpler:

fire_event(”field”,”blur”)

On using this in a Cucumber step, the ajax is fired as the blur command tells the browser to take focus off the field.

Lovely!

Setting up Merb, Cucumber and Webrat (and friends) on Snow Leopard

September 4th, 2009 • 2 comments Cucumber, Mac, Merb, OS X, Ruby, Webrat, bdd, programming, software development

Portal containers: Supporting the vision of technology-agnostic applications?

April 15th, 2009 • Internet, Java, Ruby, portal
Tags: linkedin

I’ve been looking at Liferay recently. It turns out to be a fantastic portal container. It’s core is not necessarily better than it’s closest rival JBoss Portal, but it comes with a mammoth selection of portlets out of the box. Also, with the support for the portlet standard being adopted across multiple technologies, you’re not locked into Java for new functionality – in fact, i’m currently building a portlet in Ruby. On top of that, the core system is covered (exactly how covered is unclear at the moment, but we’ll gain that awareness soon), in Selenium RC integration test scripts. Perfect! All that’s missing is an adoption of BDD stories, but that can be added.

One warning – accessibility not out of the box

Liferay’s out of the box portlets are not accessible! It’s a known issue and Liferay want the community to support them in fixing this. Seems like a reasonable request and it’s lack of focus on accessibility stems most likely out it’s origins in USA. They care less than the brits about this stuff!

Tutorials

I’ll post tutorials as i progress through my Ruby portlet development and integration.

What is a DSL?

April 15th, 2009 • Ruby, dsl, programming
Tags: linkedin

I tweeted a link to this url, but didn’t blog it. I should have, so here it is:

What is a DSL?

It got me all excited so i’ve started (slowly, i’ll admit) to write my own DSL in Ruby. I’ll post how i get on.