blog
spec by example ruby framework
THIS IS A DRAFT;) This is my first blog post in 2 years, so bare with me. Not sure about google sites as a blogging platform though ... TL;DR:
About me I am a ruby developer and a part time Agile Coach. I have been evangelizing about User Acceptance Testing aka "Specification by Example" with cucumber since 2008. My biggest project involving cucumber happened inside a betterplace.org btw 2009..2010. We used it to communicate with the Product Owners and run acceptance tests (a 30 minutes build without parallel_tests). I aslo wrote courgette, a Rails engine to browse features. If you want to know more, I recommend you follow @gojkoadzic and buy his book "Specifications by example" or even better see him live at a conference: he is a real performer;) cucumber features have an high maintenance cost. I have felt the pain in 3 different projects - I am about to tear into parts my t-shirt with a giant cuke icon - it's time to move on! It seems that I am not the only one;) "Where exactly should I put my step definitions? What if they're corelated - can I abstract them in a simple way? Can I reuse them across projects? Could I even test them? With cucumber, you usually run into this kind of situations and there's no easy way to get over it. You should use better step file namings perhaps? Create some methods that live next to each other in the cucumber World? Nah, it just doesn't feel good." Josep Jaume Rey, 21st of October 2011 "In the beginning, it was fantastic, the overhead of Cucumber was gone, we were insanely productive. But over time, cracks appeared. As the projects grew larger, the tests became more and more difficult to maintain." Jonas Nicklas, 17th of November 2011 My 2 main concerns:
TODO: rspec-set or before :all to faster unit tests. There is no equivalent in cuke & co. Review of potential solutions: codegram' Spinach, elabs' Turnipand coulda.Note: I haven't used these libraries in real projects. Both Spinach and Turnip only run on ruby 1.9. Both use plain text features a la cucumber, parsing it with Gherkin for Turnip and a gherkin-ruby for Spinach, which unfortunately only supports english at the moment. This is an issue, as an Agile coach living in non-english speaking country (France!), I want to write features in my native tongue. Turnip has global steps but it is possible to scope them using tags. In Spinach, each feature has its own steps (so no more global steps). That solves the problem of steps madness. Both have dropped regular expressions! Bravo:) In Turnip, you can however use placeholders in your step definitions, like this: step "there is a monster called :name" do |name| @monster = Monster.new(name) end Spinach only supports plain text step but to be honest, that's not a big deal. Scenarios should be written at the right level of abstraction for your customers, in a short and declarative style. Placeholders can encourage your to write scenarios in an imperative style. I disagree with the design choice of plain text features which need to be parsed in order to be executed as tests. One one hand, as I wrote earlier, it is SLOW. On the the other hand, I can't help thinking it would be so much practical to have it all in 1 place. Having to read multiple step definitions which are not sorted because they are "re-usable" and match them with the scenario is a mental effort which slows me down.
It can render features as plain text in Gherkin format which is cool to communicate with customers. It's easy to DRY step definitions are the DSL is pure ruby. Example: module LoginSteps
def given_I_am_logged_in
Given "I am logged in as a Guest" do
log_as_guest
end
endSomething feels weird: it is built on top of Test::Unit which is an Unit Testing framework and was never designed to run acceptance tests. The theory of unit tests is that all test_ methods should be independent and can be run in any order (there is more of course). By contrast, an acceptance scenario is a sequence of steps which must be run in order. Compare to Spinach top notch logo, website and documentation, coulda feels old school. It is just an impression, its codebase is small and easy to grasp but it does not seem to be an active project. Spinach runs scenarios with its own runner, which makes a lot of sense to me. It is supported by codegram amazing team and the code is lovely ;) Disclaimer: I have met only once with these guys, in euruko 2011 but I don't own them anything! Turnip is an extension for RSpec. It also makes me feel awkward. On one hand, RSpec is not the fastest test framework, it has too much magic. Check this blog post, http://blog.rawonrails.com/2012/01/very-cursory-test-of-rspec-28-speed.html to see what I mean. Don't get me wrong, I have been using RSpec since the beginning of 2007 and I am not sure still if I'll try minitest/spec. This will take time, probably most of 2012, but I would love if the ruby cuke community works together on this. I am trying to do my bit with this blog post. I have done more: I have written some code! A final note, solving Spinach mono linguist short sighting will be easy too. No Gherkin parser is needing, we can tweak the Spinach DSL to add language and write a simple Spinach reporter based on https://github.com/cucumber/gherkin/blob/master/lib/gherkin/i18n.yml Links: http://www.jackkinsella.ie/2011/09/26/why-bother-with-cucumber-testing.html |
Ruby eco system
http://ruby-ecosystem.heroku.com/#11 100 slides which give a good introduction https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ Impossible to re-invent the wheel http://rubyonrails.org/ecosystem MVC webapp framework http://basecamphq.com/ from 37signals SaaS http://37signals.com/svn/ blog from @dhh who invented Rails http://infoether.com/ruby-and-rails-whitepaper sounds good |
Javascript links
French cowboys
Pole emploiLe déploiement du système informatique du Pôle emploi suspendu LEMONDE.FR avec AFP | 07.06.10 | 19h06  e déploiement du sytème informatique Neptune, qui fusionne les logiciels de l'ANPE et des Assedics suite à la fusion de ces deux services, "a été suspendu pour éviter un blocage complet", a annoncé la direction du Pôle emploi, à la veille d'un appel à la grève mardi contre les mauvaises conditions de travail. L'objectif du nouveau système est en test depuis plusieurs mois, mais "il y a des incidents" selon la direction : "dans les quelques régions tests, notamment Aquitaine et Poitou-Charente, les utilisateurs sont susceptibles de buter sur 'une durée anormale de connection au poste de travail' et le 'chargement incomplet du profil utilisateur'". LE PRÉCÉDENT GÉODE Ce n'est pas la première fois que les services de l'emploi butent sur des problèmes informatiques. Au milieu des années 1990, l'ANPE avait souhaité développer une application informatique, baptisée Géode, finalement abandonnée en septembre 2005, sans jamais avoir démarré, en dépit de l'importance des dépenses engagées (118,4 millions d'euros à comparer au devis initial de 26 millions d'euros), selon la Cour des comptes. Les pannes participent à la situation difficile au Pôle emploi, liée à la surcharge de travail et à la mise en place progressive de la fusion, selon l'intersyndicale appelant à la grève mardi formée du SNU-FSU (premier syndicat), de la CGT, SUD, le SNAP, et localement certains élus FO. Ils dénoncent le mal-être croissant des agents, la lenteur des négociations sur le stress et la précarité de certains personnels (le Pôle emploi compte 15 % de CDD et contrats aidés). skyrockhttp://www.ecrans.fr/Les-Skyblogs-decodent-grave,9981.html A partir de la nouvelle plateforme Waka du gouvernement, hébergée chez Skyrock, le pirate aurait exploité une faille pour accéder à un serveur, sur lequel il a rajouté un fichier nommé « Coucou », ainsi que divers scripts. De cette façon, il aurait potentiellement eu accès à 32 millions de mots de passe d’utilisateur et donc à leurs comptes et leurs blogs. Zataz.com rappelle également, dans son article, que Skyrock avait déjà été contrôlée il y a plus d’un an par la CNIL qui avait pu constater que les mot de passes, bien qu’étant stockés dans un serveur sécurisé, n’étaient pas cryptés. Un problème qui ne semble pas avoir été corrigé depuis, laissant ainsi tout loisir au hacker de les piocher et de les lire sans autre forme de complication. Bien sûr, les blogueurs peuvent bien modifier leurs mots de passe non cryptés autant qu’ils le souhaitent, mais ce n’est pas ça qui devrait empêcher les hackers d’y mettre la main. EDFhttp://eco.rue89.com/2010/05/25/comment-pirater-la-facture-edf-de-vos-voisins-salaries-ou-clients-151951 Il suffit d'une facture qui traîne ou utilisée comme justificatif de domicile pour tout savoir sur votre consommation d'électricité, via le site d'EDF. Mieux : la faille permet de gérer votre contrat à votre place, jusqu'à fermer votre compteur. SNCFhttp://www.connexionfrance.com/computer-bug-sncf-train-tickets-bank-holiday-weekend-view-article.html May 21, 2010
Etat francais:http://eco.rue89.com/2010/05/12/chorus-le-logiciel-qui-empeche-letat-de-payer-ses-factures-151106-0 Un projet coûteux et en retardAu ministère du Budget, on confirme l'objectif annoncé par le précédent ministre, Eric Woerth : le 1er janvier 2011, tous les ministères passeront à Chorus. Un an plus tard que prévu au lancement du projet, et près de dix ans après le vote de la Lolf (loi organique relative aux lois de finances). Chorus est le volet informatique de cette loi. Les fonctionnaires ne sont pas les seuls à douter. Dans un rapport de 2009, la Cour des comptes estimait que Chorus compliquait l'évaluation des comptes publics. Et en mars, elle était revenue à la charge dans un courrier à Eric Woerth. Les députés sont encore plus critiques. En juillet 2009, la commission des Finances de l'Assemblée nationale concluait ainsi un rapport sur Chorus :
Des « affirmations non confirmées » ? Le calendrier trop optimiste, mais aussi des coûts sous-estimés et des économies surévaluées. Les coûts ? Le plafond prévu par l'Inspection générale des finances, dans un rapport de 2006, est déjà atteint. Les députés ont revu les coûts à la hausse :
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RAIL travellers trying to get away for the bank holiday weekend have been unable to buy tickets this afternoon due to a technical problem. Web workers camp (NoSQL) in Paris 03/07/2010
25 projects Bruno Michel AF83 bases nosql redis: coup de coeur key / value, easy to expire some keys (start_with funk*) mongodb: Doc DB, learning curve to learn easy to learn from SQL riak: doc DB, more complex than mongodb, less operator, Map Reduce on documents, content _type bin / json. Easy to set up a distributed archi, not mature, graphs DB cassandra: for hackers, made in facebook. Very high volumes (twitter) . Dynamo / Bigtable (google DB) Hard to learn / deploy, riak is easier neo4J: graphs DB, for some problematics: friends of friends. 1 machine only, no scaling resque: queuing, made in github, beanstalkd: is also good, replacing crontab, very simple puppet / chef : data center automation chefsolo : for 1 machine vagrant: I missed eventmachine: ruby library, fast simple ErrorNot : af83 Web UI from multiple machines, open source . ruby / php / python LamsonProject: MVC for email with routes, mailing list management, antispam Processing.js : graphics on js, ruby binding Strophe.js : XMPP from browser (eg: presence) Jasmine: BDD js with plugins for testing node.js http-console: in node.js command line for http, manage cookies very easily, for stuff hard to test with firebug ndislocqte hummingbird: node.js analytics on node.js, real time. Nice to look at but no real value Realie: real time collaborative code editor node.js, hard to install sass : ruby less.js : js port of less in ruby in node.js or run directly in browser. Syntax same as standard CSS + variables, easier for designer ShakaCSS : af83, cross browser js bookmarklet , features which are not available in web developer. Visual bcat: pipe to browser utility. tail -f mylog.log | bcat some browser, ruby ? node.js : no package management, hard to set up some stuff h1. node.js Ryan : for scripting network programs HTTP lib -> streaming : faster than nginx, thin; Due to V8 VM+ callbacks * default response: chunked & keep alive * Long point requests; like in a chat, we don't want to ping back the server to check if there is more data Web sockets will do that but IE 6-7 won't ... * HTTP Parser: no buffer, 28 bytes / HTTP stream : very little memory * exec some system commands, err / output within a callback * spawn * sys.pump() Rails waits for the response while querying the DB Latency: DISK & NETWORK r 41M & 24M cycles : very very far calculate is 2 cycles .... Multithreading is not free, context switching takes memory nginx does that well Node.js : callbacks Single process single thread single execution stack model w/ event callbacks. NEVER block on I/O js suits very well this style: anonymous functions, closures, 1 callback at the time |
Scottish Ruby Conference 2010
The Scottish Ruby Conference is over and to quote a few tweets, that was *AWESOME* ! Linkshttp://scottishrubyconference.com/ http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23scotruby http://www.flickr.com/groups/scotruby2010/ http://groups.google.com/group/scottishrubyconference People
Tech Conferences are about socializing and networking. Sadly, the French conferences Paris on Rails 2007 & 2008 completely missed some social time and I hope the French speaking ruby community (who's up for it?) will organize a ruby conf in 2010 or 2011 in a big café or in a venue where people can chat. Personal conclusions from this conference
Later, he explained why mobile phones with internet access will encourage people to drop their "heavy metal box with 4 wheels to transport 1 person which make a lot of noise, eat lots of public space and pavements and pollute the air with nasty particulate matters" in favor of public transports. OK maybe he used the word "car" instead of metal boxes .... His point was: why spending 1 hour in a car doing nothing when you can work / read yr emails in the train or bus? When peak oil arises, people who live in area with no public transports will have to move anyway so you'd better anticipate on that one :-) Therefore, I have decided to go my green "coming out", I will declare publicly for who I want to work, focussing on social and ecological impacts.
I have started writing this blog post in the train from Edinburgh en route to London. There is indeed an excellent free WIFI connection and electricity plugs for every seat! KUDOs to EastCoast for that. For once, I wish the French National Railways follow the example of the British :-) I have finished it in a café inside King Cross International train station, again with free internet!!! Apart from Mulhouse train station, I don't know any other train station with free WIFI :-( I am definitely impressed by the public service internet provided by the British. First Day:Jim Weirich's keynote: an interesting design idea about using 3 different levels of abstractions: a first level with private primitives and then public methods which use these primitives Rocket fuelled cucumbers: Joseph Wilkcucover, still active Matt? Ragel will improve parsing time a lot : gem install gherkin Jo is working on a new Testjour which will work on EC2 pairwise gem test js with harmony cucumber --format usage, The slowest step definitions (with duration) are listed first Mocks: just an introduction but with real people playing the mocks: quite fun! Shame I did not go to the BoF session about Mocks to describe the use cases I find totally inappropriate for mocking design development. RSpec: require 'spec_helper' Rack middleware UNIX: Rediscovering the wheelTo make sure you don't blow up yr app server running rake tasks or scripts; use: nice -19 Lightning talkshttp://github.com/jnicklas/capybara by Jonas Nicklas. webrat is dead, viva Capybara! http://redcareditor.com/ by Daniel Lucraft, an IDE based on Eclipse / jruby with very little core and many plugins. Driven by Cucumber and RSpec: wow! Second Day:Tim Bray Key notehttp://twitter.com/timbray Key Note was the most inspiring talk for me at this conference. I had to chance to chat with him at the party on Saturday night and I really enjoy it. He divided his talk into 3 parts:
He also mentioned http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/ Oh S***: How to bring a big Rails website down (and how not to)http://www.scribd.com/doc/27168812/Oh-Shit-How-to-Break-a-Large-Website-and-how-not-to-PDF-versionScribd.com is one of the largest Rails sites on the Internet, and at that scale, even innocuous new features or fixes can bring the website down. I'll walk through some of my mistakes and tell you what I've learned about writing code for giant Rails sites. Tim Morgan
USe Postgres with a functional index Use WHERE login = BINARY 'mylogin' for case insensitive
Write Bad CodeHow to leverage speed-coding and technical debt for business success. Gwyn Morfey where is the Train which will hit you? Don't skip Planning Start with a Question; How done is done done? Plugin should work out of the box (copy / paste), satisfing. timebox 30 min cheat : sacrifice performance http://github.com/newbamboo auto_migrations Dragonfly, heroku Javascripts for rubyists1995: Ruby & js were born functions are objects, Functions as args aka callbacks this with apply ... OOP js protoype got it wrong link_to_remote : NOOOOOOOOOOOO bad SoC You're Doing it Wronggit_remote_branch test rake tasks Rails will see defaults set in DB Talks I think I should have gone:Genetic Algorithms with Ruby |
Is what you are doing with computers worth doing?
Readers who reach the end of a book are entitled to some praise from the author, since they have paid him the greatest compliment an author can receive. Yet those readers who do reach the end are probably in less need of rewards than the dropout, for it would seem impossible to go all the way through any book without receiving the reward of learning. Perhaps it is possible to go through this book without being touched, although as one reviewer commented, \"One comes away with the feeling of having spent a pleasant but somewhat 'wasted' afternoon of reading, and as the old joke goes, 'it ain't till you try to turn your head that you realize how sharp the razor was.' \" Although I would have been happier with a less violent metaphor, the remark captures what the book has tried to do. My students have had the same reaction. A typical remark made a year after attending a seminar is: \"It was pleasant enough talking about those things, but then I began to see what was going on at the office. Wow!\" The most important thing that this student learned was not any particular behavioral science result or the name of so-and-so's law to parrot back on a test. What he learned was that he had been carrying around with him all his life a well-equipped machine for observing behavior— but that it had never been used very much. As an anonymous sign at the computing center put it: The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity—the rest is overhead for the operating system. So rather than be concerned so much about that computer operating system, the reader who has really been touched by this book will start to work on the operating system he carries around in his own central processing unit—his head. That will be his reward. But if we make our own operating systems more efficient, if we observe ourselves and our surroundings more carefully, and if this efficiency and observation lead us to be more productive programmers, of what use is it? The stories of the three wishes send us a message from many cultures, and from the ancient past: \"If you get your fondest wish, what then?\" If, by psychological, sociological, and anthropological investigation or by simple heightened awareness we become better programmers, to what work shall we turn our talents? For if something is not worth doing, it is certainly not worth doing right. Is what we are doing with computers worth doing? is what you are doing with computers worth doing? Because computers are such fascinating beasts, because programming is such a game, such a joy, we who program computers are in danger of becoming the unwitting pawns of those who would use our toys for not-so-playful ends. Can there be any doubt that if Hitler had computers at his command, one of the first application would have been keeping closer track on Jews and Gypsies so that all who should have gone to the ovens did go to the ovens? Can there by any doubt that if Pilate had computers, they would have been used to keep the information from informers, the better to crucify those that were crying out for crucifixion by their heretical zeal? Can there be any doubt that somewhere in our country today some human beings are using computers as just another, finer weapon in their arsenal of ways to subjugate other human beings to their wishes—to their conception of the proper life of man? And having said all that, can there be any doubt that such people— now as in 1939 or at the dawn of the Christian era—find many willing hands and brains to carry out their work in return for fun and profit? Or that some of those willing hands will have held this book, to the profit of their employers? Many years ago, just a few years after I wrote my first book with Herb Leeds, I read an article describing experiments in which monkeys were subjected to various doses of poison gases, evidentally to see how long it took them to die. The work was done in a laboratory for chemical warfare research, with the intent, no doubt, of extrapolating it to human beings. Thirty-six innocent monkeys, as I recall, met their deaths in this gruesome way so that someday, perhaps, thirty-six million people could meet their deaths even more efficiently. The article remained in my mind for months afterward, and indeed it has remained there to this day. By pure coincidence, I suppose, I was accosted at a meeting by a nice young man who had gone out of his way to tell me how much he had learned from our book, how much it had helped him to become a better programmer. I asked him what sort of work he did, and he replied that he worked at a laboratory for chemical warfare research. Afterward, I tried to rationalize my way out of my depression by imagining that it was a different laboratory, which it might have been, or that he never worked on the monkey experiment, which might also have been true. But I knew that somewhere, someone who had learned from me was participating in such experiments and worse. I knew that I shared the responsibility—that writing a book is not merely teaching means to unknown and unimagined ends. For a long time I could not write, perhaps for that reason, or perhaps for others. But, eventually, my ego got the better of me and I began again, determined to try making my books unusable to any but the pure at heart. To a certain extent, this book may have achieved that goal, for the idea of the programmer as a human being is not going to appeal to certain types of people, and they will neither finish the book nor profit from it. But it is naive, I now realize, to expect that bad systems cannot be built by people with good hearts. Otherwise, why would I encounter so many bad systems when almost all of the people I meet are wonderful? No, something else is needed, something not within the power of an author to give to a reader. As Malraux once said, \"It is the work of a lifetime to make a man.\" A book can be but a tiny part of that work— the rest is up to you, and the work will never be finished. Having said all that, I do not shrink from personal responsibility for what I have done in writing this book. We stand at the brink of a new age, an age made possible by the revolution that is embodied in the computer. Standing on the brink, we could totter either way—to a golden age of liberty or a dark age of tyranny, either of which would surpass anything the world has ever known. Perhaps no individual's efforts will make any difference in the result, but we must never cease trying, for then the result is sure to be tyranny. This book is my effort against the tyranny, the enslavement of men by other men and by their own ignorance. Would that it not be adopted by the forces of tyranny themselves, as no doubt it will be. Lacking that hope, I can only hope that its use to the other forces will, in the balance, be greater. |
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