Noel Rappin Writes Here

Book Status

Beta 4 should be available this week, or at the latest Monday, apparently we’re working around people’s vacation schedules. It will have two new chapters, and some error fixes and tweaks around the book.

Next is on to Beta 5.

In status news that shouldn’t interest you much, the end of the quarter meant the end of my first Pragmatic pay period. And apparently Pragmatic pays as soon as possible, rather than waiting 30 or 90 days after the end of the pay cycle. That’s pretty great, from my point of view. Again, no reason why you should care.

Links

Envy Labs is announcing Ruby Tracker, the Ruby Dependency Manager. Basically, you give Ruby Tracker your code repository, and it analyzes your gem dependencies and notifies you when any of them are updated. Sounds interesting. I wonder if it might be most useful when first taking over a legacy project to see just how out of date it is. (Not that I would necessarily recommend updating a legacy project first thing, but it’s good to see exactly what you are up against…)

A new beta of RubyMine 2.5 is now available. The big Rails feature is support for LESS CSS. Also, Mac users now have a native file directory, which is nice in that the old one was a pain in the neck, as well as a couple of other Mac-ish tweaks.

Mark Guzdial, over at the Computing Education blog links to some older articles by the one-and-only Alan Kay about the promise of spreadsheets and the like. Reading the kinds of things Kay was doing and speculating on 25 years ago or more is humbling – the rest of the world hasn’t quite caught up.

I linked to the first two parts of this yesterday, here’s part 3 of Kent Beck’s survey data on testing. This one is how often those surveyed run unit tests, with just over half running them on every code change.

I like this pattern – here’s Bogdan Gusiev with a custom RSpec matcher to test validation for ActiveRecord. (The code is here) The matcher lets you say things like it { should accept_values_for(:name, "Fred", "Jim") } and it {should_not accept_values_for(:name, "23", "M&Y". That’s nice because it makes the test independent of the validation code being used.

Jay Fields has a post talking about what keeps Java developers from adopting Ruby or Clojure, and how they don’t yet realize that the power of the languages and of command-line interactive terminals will overcome the relative lack of IDE support, which matches my experience pretty much exactly.

Finally

This article summarizes some rumor chatter going around that Apple is planning on either replacing Objective-C or offering another language as a full alternative for the creation of say, iOS applications. Just a couple of points. I suspect that this is at least something that Apple is researching – they’d be crazy not to. Apple already supports MacRuby, so the idea that MacRuby could target iOS isn’t completely insane. Still, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they went back to the future and started supporting Dylan? Nothing would cement the “iPad is evolutionary Newton” theory more…