Noel Rappin Writes Here

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.

Top Story As you probably know, both Rails 3 and Bundler went final over the weekend. The Rails 3 release notes are up, as well as extensive coverage on the Rails Guides page. I’ll also mention Jeremy McAnally’s Rails 3 Upgrade handbookhttp, and Gregg Pollack’s list of great Rails 3 documentation sources. And, just for the hell of it, here’s the post I wrote back when Rails 3 was first announced.

Book Status Beta 6 is out and available for sale here. The major addition is the new Shoulda chapter. It’s also available from Amazon. Note that the ship date for the print book seems to have moved to November. Next up is the RSpec chapter, which will probably be Beta 7 sometime in the next week to ten days. After that, most likely a new chapter on test performance / performance testing.

Book Status Spent yesterday’s book time rearranging the Shoulda chapter so as to be more focused on the general ideas than the specific Shoulda interpretation. Today’s job is making sure it all still flows. Links So I have something like a half-dozen half-finished blog posts. Until the day some of those become fully finished, here’s a few links. Simone Carletti has list of practices to follow in your Rails 2.3 app to make it more compatible for an eventual upgrade to Rails 3.

Book Status Beta 5 should be out today, with the legacy and the Rails 3. Next up are the Shoulda and RSpec chapters, starting with figuring out how to handle the changes in Shoulda since I last wrote the chapter. Rails I’m sure all of you within the interest circle of this blog already know that Rails 3.0 RC 1 was released yesterday. Part of me wants to say “finally”, but that really isn’t fair.

The end of the repair story At the end, a very positive experience with Apple support. The repair was free, done when they said it would be done, and all told, I spent less than fifteen minutes in the store between both halves of the visit. Plus, they replaced the top part of my pre-unibody MacBook, which was worn down and discolored from my gunky hands, almost as though they didn’t want an ugly Mac in the field.

Link post today. Turns out I built up more links than I thought. Book Status Somehow I wound up writing and editing the Rcov chapter, which, among other things, is the first time I’ve had to wrestle with RSpec 2 vs. RSpec 1 behavior, when writing about how RSpec and Rcov get along. Now I need to figure out how to write about that more coherently. Actually, I need to decide if I’m going to acknowledge RSpec 1 at all.

Still catching up on links. The PeepOpen review has morphed into a larger IDE/TextMate piece, hoping to finish that today. Book Status Still working on the renovated Style chapter, which will probably combine the chapters that are in the current Table of Contents as “Testing Style and Structure”, “Fix Slow Tests”, “Rcov”, and “Help! My Test Is Failing”. The chapter on Legacy testing will remain a separate chapter – I get asked about how to test legacy projects all the time.

Sorry for the involuntary day off yesterday. Lot of links, I’ll try and be brief. RailsConf and Related DHH’s Tuesday keynote is up. Presumably this is different from last year’s keynote about Rails 3. The other keynotes will probably become available in the next few days. David announced Rails 3 beta 4 at his keynote. It looks like we’ll be getting a release candidate in another couple of days. The Ruby Hero awards were given.

Today is the RailsConf tutorial day, with the conference proper starting tomorrow. I was less disappointed than I thought I would be when my talks were not accepted, but I’m more disappointed than I thought I would be not to be going. Have fun, everybody. On the other side of the country, today is the Apple WWDC keynote, which I’m sure I’ll join the rest of the internet in obsessing over.

Quick links post: Gregory Brown is looking for comments and donations for a proposal for a Ruby Mendicant University, basically a rolling online Ruby course. Charles Nutter is interviewed by InfoQ on the state of JRuby. Yehuda Katz has a long post on various kinds of extensions in Rails 3 – gems, plugins, generators. This one I need to look at in some detail. The new RubyMine 2.5 beta integrates with Pivotal Tracker.

Yesterday… Gave my talk at Chicago Ruby. The video is already online – yay Chicago Ruby team. I was pleased with it, actually, I did pretty much what I hoped to do, except that I thought the repetition joke would get a bigger laugh. In other news Yehuda Katz posted slides on another Rails 3 talk: dashing to the finish. Speaking of people on stage, Steve Jobs was interviewed on stage at the D conference yesterday.

Short today, but preparing some longer, more rant-y bits for the future… Book status Not much forward motion for the next few days, as I have a lot of other stuff to do, including preparing for Chicago Ruby on June 1 and doing a bit of touch-up on Obtiva’s 4-Day Ruby on Rails/TDD boot camp. All fun, but time consuming. Some Links A quick tutorial by Peter Cooper on setting up JQuery in Rails 3.

Book Status Committed what I hope will be the Beta 3 version of the Cucumber chapter. Most of the changes were in the various conclusions. When I originally wrote the chapter, Cucumber was still quite new, and I had kind of a ragged set of thoughts about how it should be used. Since then, I’ve used it more, and more importantly, there’s been a lot more community discussion about how Cucumber is best used, so I needed and was able to tighten up that part a bit.

Top Story Just a quick update here. Cucumber chapter newest draft is complete, and I’m hoping it will be beta 3 early next week. Not sure what to do next, I need to look around and see what’s relatively stable with respect to Rails 3. The book is still on sale. Tell all your friends. And then Rails Dispatch this week is about the new routing in Rails 3. Yehuda Katz has a really nice article on workflow with git.

Top Story I’ll mention somebody else’s book, but don’t worry, I plan on doing it in a totally self-absorbed kind of way. Pragmatic released Using JRuby into beta yesterday, by the core JRuby team. Looks good, interested to see where they go with it. Because I’m me, I can’t help but compare the structure of the book with the Jython book I did. Biggest structural difference so far is that we were unable to assume a Python-savvy audience, so we felt we had to awkwardly teach Python for 100 pages at the start of the book, where as the JRuby book is able to teach Ruby in an Appendix.

Hey, where were you? Sorry about that, I spent most of last week running the Obtiva Ruby/Rails/TDD 4-day boot camp training, and I didn’t have time to do this daily catchup. Hey, if you think you need me or somebody like me to come to your company and blather about Ruby and Rails for a few days, contact us at http://www.obtiva.com. It’s fun. Book Status Rails test prescriptions: still on sale.

Top Story What else, but the actual live sale page for Rails Test Prescriptions, which is http://www.pragprog.com/titles/nrtest/rails-test-prescriptions. You should be able to see the cover off to the right sidebar. (As I write this, they haven’t turned on the “Buy” link, sometime today, I think). I like the mortar and pestle in the cover, it has a nice resonance with “prescriptions” and also, at least for me, a little bit of a tinkering kind of vibe.

Top Story/Book Status This is the week – Rails Test Prescriptions should go on beta sale on Wednesday. In a related story, railsrx.com now points to here, railsprescriptions.com also will shortly. I’ll be adding some basic about information and static pages here. At some point, I’ll probably bring over any blog content from the previous site that still seems relevant. I’m not sure if the original free version of Rails Test prescriptions will still be available (it’s becoming out of date, and there will be free samples available at Pragmatic), but I will make it available if anybody is still interested.

Book Status Not much new to report. Still in the webrat and capybara space. It does look like April 21 will actually be the beta date really and for true. Top Story Well, it’s got to be Joss Whedon possibly directing the Avengers movie, right? The Internet would never lie to me about Joss. It’s not like there’s a collective internet freakout any time some rumor about a Whedon project comes through.