rails

It really surprises me that there are people arguing that writing controller tests doesn’t make sense. Probably the most common argument is that actions are covered in acceptence tests along with checking if views are properly rendered. Right? Right…well that’s just wrong! Are you trying to say that your slow acceptance tests are covering every possible controller action scenario? Are you trying to say that, for instance, every redirect that should take place is tested within an acceptance test? Are you also checking every invalid request in acceptance tests? Are you telling me that your acceptance test suite takes 27 hours and 13 minutes to finish because you fully test your controllers there?! Oh I’m sure that your acceptance test suite runs faster and you probably cover only ‘the happy scenarios’ there…which basically means you miss A LOT of test coverage. ...

“Skinny Controller, Fat Model” is a well known best practice in Ruby community. Everybody seems to agree with it and follows it. It’s pretty clear what a skinny controller is. The question is what is a fat model and what should we do if it gets too fat? Even better, what should we do to avoid too fat model? I think many people still confuse Domain Model with ActiveRecord. It’s something more and in this post I will try to explain my new approach to writing Ruby on Rails applications. ...

A while ago I have written a post about JavaScript helpers in Ruby on Rails and tried to explain why they are a bad idea. It’s hard to believe for me that it was almost 2 years ago! Since then so many things have happened in the Ruby world…Now Rails 3 is on its way and we already know what significant improvements and changes it will include. One of them is related to JavaScript helpers and the way how remote links and forms will be handled and I must admit that the new idea is absolutely great. ...

Ruby on Rails gained so much attention and appreciation mostly because it simplifies the development process of AJAX-driven applications. When I started to learn Rails I was already very familiar with other MVC-based frameworks, and actually I’ve created one myself (in PHP5) in my previous work. My framework also uses Prototype JavaScript library, so when l was learning Rails it was nothing new when I saw “Ajax.Updater(…)”. I remember that when I added first AJAX-feature in the Depot (it’s a tutorial application used in well known “Agile Web Development in Ruby on Rails” book) I was shocked about how simple it is, but then I looked into the HTML output and it shocked me once more… ...