Technologies

[Andy Allan]

On 30 August 2012 22:49, Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> wrote:
> 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.

It's a long time since I've looked at the rails-port tests. There's a
lot of things I'd like to change, but I'm wary about changing for
change's sake - given that I know how long it took Shaun to write most
of them originally, and that I'm unlikely to be spending a similar
amount of time to re-implement things! So take what I say with a pinch
of salt.

> 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?

I use capybara for testing pages, I don't have any issues with that. I
don't, however, use any of the javascript drivers, so I can't comment
on selenium vs webkit. When I've tried getting selenium working
before, it's been a bit of a nightmare.

> 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.

Yep, in summary:

* FactoryGirl as a replacement for fixtures
* shoulda-matchers
* rspec instead of test::unit, but I doubt it's actually worth the hassle.
* haml instead of erb
* devise
* declarative_authorization instead of scattered authorisation around
controller actions

Cheers,
Andy