To use thor with your merb 1.0.15 app, you need to install thor -v0.9.9 and then follow the instructions on this page: http://wiki.merbivore.com/deployment/bundling

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

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

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!

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

What do you do if you have, say, an encrypted sparsebundle and some day you try to open it and you discover it shows up as a plain folder in the Finder instead as a bundle icon?

Double clicking will just open the folder and show you the bands that make up the bundle.

I’ve forgotten how to fix the issue,  you can at least mount the contents of the bundle by typing this is the terminal: "/path/to/bundle/name_of_bundle.sparsebundle/"

Then you’ll have your virtual drive mounted on teh desktop, and if need be you can just copy them to a new sparsebundle.

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

To test it, i tried the ThinkBroadband speed tester, (that i successfully used to test USB tethering), but it failed to complete the test.

I then tried the Broadband speed tester site and got the above results, as well as a 74kbps upload speed.

When (if!) i find time, i’ll go digging and find out if there’s an obvious reason for this – it’s clearly shouldn’t be bottlenecked by the performance of BlueTooth, as it should run up to 3 Mbit/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth)

Lovely

Now to test the Bluetooth speeds

An important point to consider.