Pervasive Code

I’m trying out Ruby Version Manager this week, and my first impression is that this is some cool technology. But I wasn’t able to figure out how to get it to install an older version of REE to get around this bug (the “Marshal.load reentered at marshal_load” issue).

Igor P’s solution is correct (just install REE 1.8.7-2009.10), but it took a little fiddling to figure out how to get RVM to use the older version of REE. Here’s how to do it:

cd ~/.rvm/archives
wget -q http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/66162/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10.tar.gz
rvm install ree-1.8.7-2009.10

I’m working on a Rails app that uses the ym4r_gm plugin, getting Google to do the geocoding for Thentic. I liked the idea of stubbing the web service call, because all those calls to an external service add up to over 20 seconds of test suite run time(!). That’s almost half of the 50 second run time of my unit tests (and 50 seconds is much too long for a unit test suite).

I found a good starting point at geokit stubbing for faster tests. I also wanted a way to stub a geocoding failure, and a way to prevent any unit tests from using the real geocoding web service.

Here’s how I did it.
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The new features in Ruby on Rails 2.2.2 have been well documented, and I’m looking forward to using several of them on WhatYouAte.com. If you’re reading this you probably are too.

However, if you’re upgrading an existing project and you’re sticking with official releases (as opposed to edge Rails) like I am, your code probably needs some tweaking to work with Rails 2.2.2. Mine certainly did. Although there were a lot of failed tests with ugly stacktraces, there were only a few API changes in Rails that needed to be accomodated to fix them all. Here’s a list of the changes that broke my app, and what I had to do to get it working again.
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I recently upgraded WhatYouAte.com to Rails 2.2.2. I had been using advice from the Rails Wiki’s HowToUseValidationsWithoutExtendingActiveRecord page. I was using a class based on the RailsWeenie code (that site is down now) and it stopped working. Here’s a new replacement hack that works almost identically.
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I’ve been moving a bunch of utility code out of a medium sized project (>10KLOC) to make it easier to test. I started by trying to make a set of plugins, but inter-plugin dependency management is basically nonexistent, and now that Rails supports explicit Gem dependencies, I decided to make them gems.

I’m happy I chose to make them gems, but I miss some of the stuff you get in a Rails project. In particular I wanted ‘rake:stats’, so I can update my estimation spreadsheet which is now almost 9 months old. I need the stats for each gem in addition to the main Rails project, in order to compare this to prior figures from the Rails project before I split it up.

So, here is the Rakefile snippet that I added, which adds the rake:stats task into a regular gem. If you don’t have the Rails gem installed, it will fail gracefully, without breaking your whole gem. So you need not make your teeny little gem depend on all of Rails being installed on every machine where your gem needs to go. Just install Rails whereever you want to run stats, which is probably already the case on your development machine.
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