For this to work, you need to run a quick one-liner on the command line:

sudo ln -s /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate /usr/local/bin/mate

Once done, you can call mate and pass it any object you want to open, such as:

$ mate my_rails_app

and it opens the entire directory as if it were a TextMate project.

Lots more detail available here: http://manual.macromates.com/en/using_textmate_from_terminal.html

My upgrade to Snow Leopard killed my Merb, Cucumber and Webrat setup so i had to start afresh. That was the bad. The good is that some manual hacks that were required in Leopard are no longer necessary, meaning I can rely on direct gem installations.

Here’s what i did:

1. Install Ruby and Gems
   Follow instructions on http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-ruby-rubygems-and-rails-on-snow-leopard/
2. Install merb, rspec, cucumber, merb_cucumber and mongrel and dependencies
   sudo gem install merb rspec cucumber roman-merb_cucumber mongrel term-ansicolor treetop diff-lcs nokogiri do_sqlite3
3. Install webrat
   sudo gem install hoe hpricot webrat
4. Fix Firefox bug with Snow Leopard
   For some reason the libsqlite3.dylib  library in FireFox 3.5.2 is out of date and breaks cucumber under Snow Leopard. Thankfully, it’s a simple fix:
   mv /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib.orig
   cp /usr/lib/libsqlite3.dylib /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib
5. Install Selenium
   sudo gem install Selenium
   sudo gem install selenium-client
6. Install the textmate cucumber bundle
   http://github.com/bmabey/cucumber-tmbundle/tree/master

Deprecated Instructions on Snow Leopard that were required on Leopard

The following ugly hacks were required on Leopard with it’s default Ruby installation. These are no longer required (at least on my machine) on Snow Leopard:

Manual hack of Selenium

http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/setting-up-selenium

As the instructions recommended replacing the Selemium RC jar file () in the installed gem with one from the Selenium website, i had to find out where the gem had installed. Thankfully, gem -h pointed me toward gem help commands and from there i ran gem environment – This told me where gems are installed locally and i found that Selemium RC had been installed into /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/Selenium-1.1.14/ I replaced as advised and then ran selenium from within the app root and all worked fine, using the replacement. I then downloaded and ran the test selenium code from http://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/tree/master/examples/selenium running selenium in a different console and then running cucumber examples/selenium/features/ . It worked a treat and booted up selenium as required. Great!

Manual hack installation of webrat

Download http://github.com/gwynm/webrat/tree/master tar file. Git clone doesn’t work

sudo gem install hoe hpricot
cd downloaded and untarred file
rake gem
sudo gem install pkg/webrat-0.2.1.gem

Balsamiq is an excellent tool for rapidly creating purposefully low-fi wireframe mockups

Napkee enables you to import Balsamiq mockups and turn them into HTML prototypes! Lovely!

Axure is excellent for rapidly creating interactive prototypes.

Liferay Portal is a pretty awesome portlet container that, with a bit of UX (HTML, CSS and JSP) hacking, enables you to rapidly produce fully functional portals. It comes with a vast array of portlets out of the box, saving you a whole load of time.

JQueryUI is a lovely toolkit for quickly developing interactive prototypes. I’m not completely convinced by it as a production tool (heavy JS? but i could be wrong), but excellent for prototyping

An important point to consider.

“The basic premise is that before any code is written, a team takes a story (or rough idea of a requirement) and fleshes out that story by producing an executable ’story test’.

Opponents say that STDD is ‘cowboy coding’, or ’snake oil’, or just ‘a hindrance to real work.’ Proponents argue that STDD produces the simplest system possible and is the wave of the future, the new frontier.”

All written in 2004! I’m just happy it’s finding its feet in smaller web agencies now. Well, at least the one work for (yes, i’m kind of pushing it)!

Here’s also a lovely PDF:

http://www.industriallogic.com/papers/storytest.pdf

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/gettingstarted/docs/objectivecprimer.action;jsessionid=EBE50C6510FD05380290B42E0C4E8EC6.worker10

I’ll add comments as i get through this primer.

Neat!

After a little thought and partially effective googling, i found that the following is an efficient process:

Introduction – What I had

• trunk
• branch_a created at SVN revision 2111
• branch_b created at SVN revision 2113

Step 1 – Preparation – Checkout local copies of trunk, branch_a, and branch_b

1. cd ~/
2. svn co http://svn_repository/trunk ./trunk
3. svn co http://svn_repository/branches/branch_a ./branch_a
4. svn co http://svn_repository/branches/branch_b ./branch_b
5. I ensured that all changes had been committed to trunk and both branches

Step 2 – Merging branch_a back to trunk after a successful rollout

1. cd ~/trunk
2. svn merge http://svn_repository/trunk http://svn_repository/branches/branch_a
3. svn commit -m “merged branch_a into trunk”

Step 3 – Merging the newly updated trunk into branch_b

1. cd ~/branch_b
2. svn merge http://svn_repository/trunk -r2113:HEAD .
3. svn commit -m “merged up from trunk, applying changes between 2113:HEAD that included changes made on branch_a”

Step 4 – When i’m ready, i’ll merge branch_b back into trunk, following Step 2 above

That’s it!

1. The project and client team write end-user functional requirements as User Stories and Scenarios
2. The stories are stored as plain text in SVN or GIT and made immediately available to the development and test teams
3. The development and test teams create a few executable padder files, wrapped around these stories, turning them into fully automatable browser tests
4. The executable files are run, they read the stories and interact with the browser to determine if the stories successfully pass

Pretty cool, huh! No more massive team specific documents, just good old plain textual stories that are shared by all on the project, including the client.

Making this happen across multiple technologies

• In Ruby, we’ve already used this parts of this approach on a live project using Cucumber (formally RSpec story runner). It worked pretty well. 
• In Java, easyb seems to be the a good forward. Here’s a little more about using easyb

I am WAY TOO EXCITED to see an implementation in Java! This opens massive opportunity to progress with a technology agnostic approach. Now to find a suitable solution for .Net and perhaps PHP