I’d like to pretend there was some thread connecting these things, but you and I both know there just isn’t…

1. Actual News: Cucumber 1.0

Starting with something approaching a real news story, Cucumber 1.0 was released today. According to that post from Aslak Hellesøy, the project has had nearly 750,000 downloads. Oh, and there’s a native JavaScript port in progress. I didn’t know that.

Anyway, Cucumber 1.0 adds Rake 1.9.2 support. Recent changes you may not know about include a -l and --lines command line switch as in RSpec’s and a new transform syntax that allows you to factor out duplicated parts of step definitions. Haven’t seen official docs on this, but it looks like it allows you to capture bits of step definition and run a block against it. The code example within the Cucumber tests looks like this:

Transform(/a Person aged (\d+)/) do |age| Person.new(age.to_i) endGiven /^(a Person aged \d+) with blonde hair$/ do |person| puts "#{person} and I have blonde hair"end

In other words, the snippet a Person aged \d+ is captured and transformed and the result of that transform block is what is passed to the step definition block.

Interesting. I wonder if people will use it?

2. The End of the World As We Know It

This post from the Armed and Dangerous blog tries to imagine a world without the web. The general idea is that if Congress had understood what DARPA was up to in the early 80’s, then funding would have been cut, and TCP/IP would not have been developed and popularized.

It’s an interesting argument, and as much as I’d like to believe it’s to dark, the examples of the cable and cell phone industries are eloquent. (I’ll grant that the author is probably trying to make a libertarian point I wouldn’t agree with in general…)

3. Books: Fuzzy Nation

Continuing playing catch-up with brief book reviews, Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi. Fuzzy Nation is something odd – a genuine remake of a beloved SF classic (well, beloved by some, I’ve never read it), namely Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. Scalzi has taken the basic elements – a guy who encounters small, sentient aliens who are, wait for it, Fuzzy – and wound his own story around them.

Fuzzy Nation is pretty much purely entertaining, fun, well structured, fast paced. It’s not as much interested in the existential questions around alien intelligence as the practical question of protecting them from a corporation that wants to strip-mine their planet. (Subtle, it’s not.) It’s one of those books that isn’t interested in re-defining the genre as much as telling a good story inside the existing boundaries.

4. Moving Beyond Thin Controllers To The Downright Emaciated

Gary Bernhardt over at the Destroy All Software blog posts some suggestions about using routing or routing-like structures to effectively remove controllers from the system. The theory is that if controllers just exist to dispatch to a specific method someplace else in the system, and Rails manages all the other connections, then why not route directly to that method with some declarative or rules-based logic to handle things like security logic, exceptional conditions, or other high-level logic.

It’s interesting, and probably could be built within Rails 3. I suspect most systems aren’t pure enough in the controllers to take advantage of it, which I guess is the point, and I wonder if the gain is worth breaking the default linkage between URL and controller/action pairs, but I’d be curious to try it.

5. In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night

Finally, I haven’t seen the Green Lantern movie yet, but I’ve been telling anybody who will listen that I’ve been waiting 30 years to be disappointed by it. Thanks to io9 for reminding me why be recapping an awesomely over-the-top Green Lantern comic from 1980 that I owned, loved, and could still quote alongside the recap. Watch GL stagger through the Arctic wilderness without his ring set upon by polar bears and wolves.