Category: software

bookmark_borderRailsConf Europe 2006…. here i come.

Posted on by Manik Juneja

Signed up for RailsConf Europe 2006, London September 14-15. It’s EXPENSIVE as compared to Chicago RailsConf in June. But I think the airfare will even out things for me. And the chicago conference got booked so fast, that I didn’t even get a chance to think seriously about attending it.

The conference is already packed with exciting speakers, including the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas, best-selling author and passion maven Kathy Sierra, Rails core developers Jamis Buck, Marcel Molina, Jr., Thomas Fuchs, Rails authors and trainers David Alan Black, and Chad Fowler, Rake author Jim Weirich and many more to be announced.

Sound like it’ll be fun …if you would be there too …. ping me and let’s meetup.

bookmark_bordertesting rails application

Posted on by Manik Juneja

Have been busy recently comparing Rails 1.1’s integration testing and WATIR and selenium for end-to-end testing a rails application.

The testing scenario is that the webserver is running on a remote Linux box in US, to which we have ssh access.
And we are testing the application from India. So we cannot run the browser on that machine.

We are writing test cases for various parts of the application using each of these tools and then we would compare notes.

A few things however are clear rightaway.

WATIR will test only for IE on windows. Firefox support for watir called firewatir is being built, and is not robust as of now. Also we might need different sets of test scripts for firefox and IE.

Selenium is the easiest to get started in the BrowseBot FITRunner mode; haven’t tried the “driven” mode yet. FIT mode would not allow us to verify values on the screen against those in the db… but then probably those tests should go into the “controller testing”(functional testing) and not be at this level. When we want to test against db for multiple controllers then rails’ integration testing is the probably the best way.

Running selenium in “driven” mode will take some research, for which i have not been able to spare time.

WATIR requires ruby and watir gems to be installed on the client computer. Hence if we want to share UI tests with our non-technical client, Selenium is better since it requires no installation.

From the aspect of writing test cases, WATIR is better than selenium’s FIT mode. Selenium test cases need to be written in html. And there is no control flow in the selenium core, though there is a user contributed library for this.

For certain kind of testing, such as against db values and checking values in session, Rails functional tests and integration tests are great.

Will share more experiences on this when we are through with the exercise.

How has your experience with these tools been?

***********************************
Received this profound quotation in my email today.

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”
Benjamin Disraeli
1804-1881, Former British Prime Minister
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bookmark_borderRuby library for Paypal Website Payments Pro

Posted on by Manik Juneja

At vinsol, we did a rails project recently which uses Paypal Website Payments Pro web api for financial settlement. We wrote the code that integrates with paypal in a separate module for reusability.

We have released the module at Rubyforge under a project named vPaypal. It is available as a gem, so you can install it directly using ruby-gems.

We are highly indebted to Pranav Bihari for this blog post which helped us getting started on using Paypal api with ruby.

Also thank to Ritu, our lead Rails programmer who wrote the complete module.

bookmark_borderBarCampDelhi

Posted on by Manik Juneja

Don’t wait to get invited to the FooCamp, signup for the barcamp today.

BarCamp, the open source version of Orielly’s FooCamp has finally arrived in Delhi.
All thanks to Jon, Amit and Gaurav for making it happen.

BarCampDelhi will be held on 4th March 2006 at Adobe’s campus in Noida.
The theme of BarCampDelhi will be “Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff”.
You can read more about it at the barcamp wiki.

I have volunteered for these sessions

  • Ruby on Rails : Rapid web application development
  • Simple Sharing Extensions : The two way RSS

If you would be interested in partnering with me on these, please drop me a mail.

I have been a TiE member for many years, it is a great community of entrepreneurs and I have learnt a lot from them.

Similarly, I hope the barcamp will help us create an NCR tech community.

So please spread the word around, this is a must attend event for all software enthusiasts in NCR.

bookmark_borderhooked to writely

Posted on by Manik Juneja

Writely, the web word processor

I have been using Writely a lot lately. It is gradually becoming my default word processor.
It makes very easy for me to write documents and share them with my team. I can send mails to my team members with link to the doc from within writely and that’s it.

While writing my last blog article, I found another reason to use writely. I was writing the post and in between I needed to lookup a word at dictionary.com, so i did a ctrl-k in firefox and entered the word. I got the meaning but the page overwrote my post. ( Normally I do a ctrl-t, ctrl-k so that the meaning comes up in a new tab) Anyways I used the browser back button, the page was reloaded and all that I had written was gone.

Learning :

1) From now on, I will write my blog posts on writely. Writely has an autosave feature. Also ctrl-s works on writely. I need not scroll down to press the “save and continue editing” button as I have to do in wordpress.

2) Autosave posts, could be an idea for a wordpress plugin that I could write. Now that wordpress admin has been so ajaxified 😉