Noel Rappin Writes Here

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Thoughtbot talks about their plans for Shoulda moving forward. The big takeaway is that, while the context library will be separated out for use in Test::Unit, both Shoulda style and Shoulda effort will be focused on RSpec integration.

I have some complicated thoughts about this one. I’m thrilled that Shoulda is being maintained – it’s a tool I’ve used a lot, and I was starting to get worried. And they should move their open source tool in any direction they want. But, of course, I can’t help thinking about how this affects me, and having Shoulda be primarily a complement to, rather than an alternative to, RSpec has an interesting effect on the book I’m in the middle of writing.

It’s so funny how these things change. It’s been about eighteen months since I started writing what would become Rails Test Prescriptions. At the time, I was not a big fan of RSpec, largely because I didn’t like the heavily mocked style that seemed to go along with it. With the emergence of Shoulda and the factory tools, Test::Unit had gained basic functional parity with RSpec. It also seemed like Shoulda/Test::Unit was really starting to gain community mindshare.

So, I wrote the book intending it to be a basically tool-agnostic guide to Rails testing, but with most of the examples in Test::Unit on the grounds that a) Test::Unit is part of the core Ruby and Rails stack, so it’s always around, b) it’s what the core team uses, c) I personally was using Test::Unit, and d) RSpec already had a book, so it seemed prudent for many reasons to find my own space. Those of you who bought the Lulu version will remember that it has longish chapters on Shoulda and RSpec, treating them more-or-less equally as alternative mature test frameworks.

In the interim, tools have ebbed and flowed. Cucumber came out, with very strong RSpec support (especially at first), starting a bit of a trend of new tools supporting RSpec over Test::Unit. The single-assertion style from Shoulda seemed to gain some traction among RSpec users. I started actually using RSpec more, and liking it.

At the same time, some things haven’t changed. I’d still like the book to be framework agnostic to the extent possible. Test::Unit is still the Rails default, and is probably still easier for a somebody new to testing to understand. But I think I have some re-writing in my future.

Oh yeah, other links

Martin Fowler on what makes a good team room for an agile project.

Speaking of RSpec 2, here’s one of what I hope will be many posts from David Chelimsky about a new RSpec feature, metadata and filtering.

Gitbox is a new Max OS X interface for Git. Currently seems less full featured than the GitX fork that I use, but it does seem like a nice start.

Relevance announces PDFKit, a new library for PDF generation, along the lines of PrinceXML. I don’t see this as a replacement for Prawn at all, though. There will always be cases where direct generation makes more sense. And there will always be cases where conversion makes sense. I think doing a book with Prawn would have been challenging, for example.

Finally, here’s a simple little survey of the Ruby community. I note parenthetically that RSpec has 42% of the vote for Preferred Testing Framework, with Shoulda and Test::Unit having a combined 31%.