Noel Rappin Writes Here

There is a long list of half-finished blog posts that are currently waiting for me to finish them, but they are all queued behind working on the book and other various life tasks.

As far as the book goes, I’m currently working on the performance chapter. This chapter will cover the Rails performance test features, and then will move to strategies for improving the actual performance of your tests.

The first part of this chapter is interesting to me because it’s one of the few features in Rails Test Prescriptions that actually map very closely to a section in Professional Ruby on Rails that I wrote three years ago. The mechanism for running the tests has gotten much easier – at that time the performance tests were more complicated to set up but the output and interpretation parts haven’t changed.

The second part of the chapter will be about ways to improve the actual speed of your test suite. I’ll talk more about that as I get further into writing it. This will also wind up being the home of the Autotest section that’s the only part of the original book that hasn’t found its way into the new book.

This will be the last new chapter to go into the book – if you’ve been closely following the betas, that means that one chapter that has been in the beta table of contents is being dropped – the one on browser-level testing. Basically, it was a chapter that was not something that I was particularly knowledgable about and we decided that it was not worth putting in the book just for the sake of saying we had a chapter there.

Anyway, this means the next beta will be the full length of the book, I’d expect to see it no later than the first week of October. After that, I know there are at least two chapters that need significant updates – the JavaScript chapter needs to swap Jasmine for BlueRidge, and the factory section might swap Factory Girl as the main example over Machinist. There are some other parts that need more minor updates.