April 27, 2010, Now Writing About Cucumbers
Top Story
For me, the top story is still Rails Test Prescriptions on sale, and my discussion yesterday of the raffle for the old Lulu customers.
Book Status
Now re-doing the Cucumber chapter, which was written long enough ago that it didn’t consider tags. Cucumber has had approximately seventy-million releases in the interim, so there’s some writing to do. This is the first chapter where I’m adding Rails 3 setup instructions, which will eventually go everywhere in the book, of course.
Tab Dump
Have to say, RVM support in RubyMine is potentially really cool.
Kent Beck would like to analogize goat farming and software development. I’ve heard worse.
I know you all have been following this story closely, so you’ll be pleased to know that you can now bring your iPad into Israel with impunity. Again, carrying two of them with the roman numerals I to X as wallpaper.
Macworld has released an epub-formatted, iBooks compatible, user guide to the iPad.
Webrat bumped it’s version to 0.7.1.
I frequently complain that there’s no good visualizer for git repositories. This fork of GitX looks like it comes pretty close, though.
Finally
I’m pretty sure I disagree with some of this article by Josh Clayton talking about integration tests being more useful than unit tests. He’s probably right about integration tests being more useful for ultimate correctness, but that’s not everything that TDD is about. Unit tests are critical for the development process, and writing great code in the moment of development, and for supporting design changes and refactoring. Unit and integration tests have two complementary functions, just because they cover the same code doesn’t mean they are redundant.