Two Parter on Hide And Seek

Two articles on the Pathfinder blog on adding show and hide toggles to a Rails application:

http://blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/2008/04/hide-and-go-see.html

http://blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/2008/04/hide-seek-and-s.html

BDD: Book Driven Development

(This one is also on the Pathfinder blog, but since it fits in here, I wanted the full text here...)

Jay Fields, who has been posting a very nice sequence of nuts-and-bolts Ruby and Rails guidelines, pauses to talk about creating examples. It's a topic I've wanted to write about here for a while, and this is as good a lead-in as any. Plus, I'm generally interested in how principles of software development apply or don't apply in odd cases, and software being developed specifically for example purposes certainly qualifies as an odd case.

For Professional Ruby On Rails, I knew that I wanted to run a single example application through the book. I had some grand visions of it being a "real" application or at least a real example of coding best practices. For best practices, I think it's pretty good on a method-by-method bases, but has some weaknesses as an entire app, for reasons that I think will become clear.

The first question was exactly what I wanted the sample application to do. On some level, this is a superficial question -- who really cares what the fake app in the book does? At the same time, certain application structures would make it easier or more plausible to discuss certain features. And I had a list of features I wanted to cover -- legacy databases, users and roles, navigation, and graphics. Ideally, the sample app would have some kind of consistency that would make it reasonable to have these features.

In addition, I didn't want it to be a thinly-veiled version of a site that everybody would recognize, and I wanted it to be something that I could type every day for six months without going crazy.

One of my first ideas was to resurrect an old Web 1.0 joke for my killer e-commerce plan: a web-based store for selling and delivering gasoline. But I decided that the gag was a lot less funny with gas in the $3 per gallon range, and I also decided that I didn't want the fake site to be primarily an e-commerce site.

Brainstorming ensued. I almost did a social networking site for pets, but I decided that was too silly, subsequently discovering that there are already a zillion pet social networking sites...

Eventually, I settled on Soups OnLine, a soup recipe-sharing site. It had the advantages of:

1. Having a data model that could plausibly handle RESTful nested resources (recipe and ingredients)

2. Having an actual user model.

3. Being a plausible site, while still being silly enough to keep anybody from taking the whole thing too seriously.

The first problem came up almost immediately -- site design. I felt that a site that was just dull HTML would not be credible or interesting, but at the same time, I didn't really have the time or resources to create a full site design from scratch, nor did I want the book to become about site design. My solution, which I'm not prepared to defend to the death, was to integrate a template from freewebtemplates.com. This kind of sideswipes the whole issue, providing reasonably good-looking site without having to get into the weeds debating CSS minutia.

Over time, the example mutated away from a normal application development process in a few interesting ways.

The nature of the book-writing itself was a strong anti-agile push, in much the same way that any large body of documentation is. Changes in code structure affect the tests, which is fine, but also affect some amount of text in the previous 300 pages, which there's no easy way to find. (As you can read in this post, the issue affected not just me, but also the editors on the book). At least once, a late change in Rails invalidated a helper method I used in an early chapter. Not a big deal, except I also used that helper method to demonstrate a test structure later in the book -- I wound up keeping a shell of the original method redirecting to the new Rails method.

Also, some features that I had hoped to get in, didn't quite get there -- because I ran out of time or because they didn't with the chapter structure. (If you read the book, you'll see some early structures that imply that the app will eventually convert between English and Metric, which I never quite got to.) Again, this is the kind of thing that happens in all the time in real projects, but is hard to smoothly redirect when there's all that pre-existing text describing the earlier plans.

Sometimes, the sample app has more features than a real app would, rather than less. Since the book tries to cover multiple plugins or ways to accomplish things, Soups OnLine wound up with far more plugin load than a normal app would -- a regular app wouldn't normally have RSpec and Shoulda and Dust, or RMagick and MiniMagick and ImageScience. Inevitably some conflicts happened between multiple plugins trying to cover the same space, making the final code somewhat wilder than I'd really like. (If you've read the book and want to experiment with the outstanding code, it's probably easiest to work with around chapter 9, before Globalize and the image plugins are added...)

Ultimately, of course, as Fields concludes, it's the author's fault if the example doesn't help the user understand the issues at hand. It's my job to understand the constraints of the form and still try to present as realistic an application as possible while explaining how to to build similar applications.

My Favorite Monkeys

New post at Pathfinder on monkey patching.

Pathfinder Post: Using Null Objects with ActiveRecord

Enjoy:

http://blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/2008/03/using-the-null.html

Using Active Record For Migrations

New post on the pathfinder blog:

Using ActiveRecord to Migrate Legacy Data

Enjoy!

Lesser Known Test Processes

New post on the Pathfinder site. I had fun writing this one. It's on some lesser known variants of test-driven development.

http://blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/2008/02/lesser-known-te.html

Publication And Other Updates

First off, several pathfinder blog posts to catch up on...

• A two part series on a quick little testing tool that I wrote called testbed. Part 1. Part2.

• Predictions for 2008

• How to test custom form builders in RSpec. I wrote this in the hope that somebody else won't have to spend two hours Googling this. Coming soon, "Why I stopped using RSpec..."

• My contribution to a discussion on duck typing, Save the Duck!

In Rails book news, I'm now proofreading the final PDF versions of the chapters, which is the first time I get to see the pages in the actual final book layout. Which is pretty cool. I'm correcting them for obvious typos, a couple of things that have changed in the last month since I last proofed the chapters, and code layout issues. Should be back to the publisher by Jan. 18th, and they claim to have the book in their warehouse by about Feb. 12th.

You can still buy your copy in advance -- that's an affiliate link, in case you care.

In other books, I just got the wxPython statement for the quarter ending Sep, 2007. About 400 net sales, which was about what I predicted, bring it to a total of around 7200.

I also just got a Jython statement, same quarter, with 160 net sales on it, literally the highest it's been in years (a couple of quarters ago, the net sales were 2). I wonder if the fact that the Jython project has started moving forward again had something to do with that. Anyway, this makes it almost plausible that I might actually get a royalty on that book at some time ever.

Two Pathfinder Blog Posts

Two things on the Pathfinder blog.

• Agile Publishing, on publishing experiences and agile methods.

• Live Ruby: Testbed, an attempt to work through a small test and metaprogramming problem live and on the blog.

Enjoy.s

Quick Book Update

Couple quick things while I have a minute...

• Just turned in Chapter 10 (of 16) of the Rails book. Still mostly on schedule for a turn in on October 26, not quite sure what that implies for a print date

• As I write this, the wxPython book is at 11 thousand and change on Amazon, the highest I've seen in months, which is probably a fluke. Weirdly Amazon says it's the #15 book on "Website Architecture & Usability", which would be great if it was, you know, actually about website architecture usability...

• New article up on the Pathfinder blog. This one is about Rails RJS templates and how to test them. It's partially a book preview, but really only an overlap of subject mat

There's more, but I'll get it when I have a chance.

Boring Software Manifesto

Another blog post up on the Pathfinder site. This one is about Agile in general, and features what I think is the World Blog Premiere of the soon to be famous Boring Software Manifesto.

Enjoy.

More On Test-Driven Development

My first post to one of Pathfinder's official blogs is up, it's a companion piece to the blog post here on Test-Driven Development, and you can find it here.