Scrabbling up the Learning Curve

A few months ago I was at the peak of my powers.

I was leading a team of ten C# developers building a huge project on Microsoft’s .NET platform. I had been working on the Windows platform for years, and there was rarely a question from the team I couldn’t answer quickly and confidently, drawing on a deep well of past experience.

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Behaviour-Driving Routes in Rails with RSpec

One thing that isn’t documented very well for RSpec is how to test your routes.

I came across an old post on the rspec mailing list which described a great way to do this:

describe TasksController "routing" do

    it "should route POST request for /tasks to the 'create' action" do
        params_from(:post, "/tasks").should == {:controller =>; "tasks", :action =>; "create"}
    end

end

Very nice.

DataMapper: A Better ORM for Ruby

One of the things that’s always irritated my about rails’ ActiveRecord framework is the way that the domain model lives in the database.Don’t get me wrong: it’s very clever, and a great showcase for ruby’s metaprogramming features, which will blow average C# / Java mind the mind when they first see it.

In rails, you build a database of your domain model, and create empty classes with the names of the domain entities (conventionally the singular of a database table name) which inherit from ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord then looks at your database, and using the magic of metaprogramming, hydrates your object with a bunch of properties that map to the database fields.

But I prefer to write my models in the code, and if you do too, you might want to take a look at DataMapper.