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.
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.