Tea-Driven Development

Okay, this is another one of those linux newbie posts where I tried to figure out how to do something that’s probably really obvious to all you seasoned hackers out there.

Anyway here I go clogging up the internet with a post that somebody, somewhere will hopefully find useful.

Are you that person? Well… have you ever used the shell command curl to fetch a web page? It’s cool, isn’t it, but you do end up with a splurge of ugly HTML tags in your terminal shell:

Eugh!

So… how about we parse that HTML into something human-readable?

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I just came across this post from Kevin Lim about a cool new tool for the (Apple-based) Safari browser called SafariStand.

A bit like HistoryHound, this plug-in allows you to quickly search your browser history, review it as thumbnails, and has a killer, iTunes-style cover-flow view of your history called History Flow:



Like Kevin, I’m still not satisfied with this, and would like to see something more like TrailBlazer, that allows me to visualise my browsing history as paths and branches.

Ideally I’d also like this data to be shared so I can socialise with other people who hang out on the same bits of the internet as I do.

Maybe it’s time to dig out that firefox extension tutorial again..?

The WatiN (Web Application Testing In .Net) framework, a port of the popular watir framework in ruby, has recently announced support for Firefox. This should make it a compelling alternative to selenium, especially as it looks to be a good deal quicker.

Sweet. Now if only I had a way to serve up an ASP.NET web application from code. Could this be what I need?

So the wife has been writing her mandatory university course diary as a wordpress blog, but now she needs to hand it in.

> Can you put it on a CD for me? She asks.

Unix to the rescue!

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I’m building an Adobe Air application at the moment, which basically means loads of javascript development.

We’re building it pure test-first, and have kicked off using jsUnit to get us started with something simple, flipping to the browser when we make a change and hitting the ‘run’ button in the jsTest testrunner HTML page.

I’m starting to find this quite unsatisfactory, however.

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If, like me, you’ve been confused by the two different, identically-named, unit testing frameworks for javascript, here’s a very useful explanation of their strengths, weaknesses, and purposes.