Technologies

[Tom Hughes]

I commented in one of the pull requests I merged a few days ago that I 
had chosen not to merge a commit that added some tests because it 
introduced some new testing technology and I thought we should discuss 
that before making a decision.

The specific technology in question was the capybara testing framework 
along with the selenium driver.

Personally I don't see any problem with capybara, though maybe some of 
the other rails people (Shaun? Andy?) here have preferences for 
something else?

Selenium is a bigger issue... Aside from the fact that it didn't 
actually work for me when I briefly tried it last night, because it 
works by driving a web browser it causes windows to start popping up all 
over the place as you run the tests which is not very helpful and is 
especially difficult if you're testing on a remote server.

An alternative would be the webkit driver, which did work for me and 
which didn't have to display any windows though I believe that is just 
because it creates a hidden X server with Xvfb which raises it's own 
portability questions.

The big advantage is that it allows us to test the web interface 
properly, including the action of any javascript.

Anyway, my more general question is what thoughts any of the rails 
experts here have on what new technologies we should be considering 
employing if any...

That includes both things like testing tools, which I know Shaun has 
expressed opinions about in the past, and things like alternative 
template languages - I think Andy has suggested HAML in the past for 
example.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/