Pervasive Code

Kent Beck tweeted:

User story: “As a princess I want to confirm my royalty so I get bruised after sleeping on 40 mattresses over a pea”. Just tell real stories”

That sounded so much like a Cucumber feature that I decided to write it as one:

Feature: Physical Sensitivity
  In order to confirm my royalty
  As a princess
  I want to be very delicate

  Scenario: 40 mattresses on a pea
  Given there is a pea on the bed
  And there is a stack of 20 mattresses on the pea
  And there is a stack of 20 featherbeds on the mattresses
  When I try to sleep on top of the stack of featherbeds
  Then I should not be able to sleep

If you’ve tried to use Machinist and autotest (part of ZenTest) you have probably seen this exception that prevented you from using it:

`method_missing': No sham defined for name

It’s discussed in the machinist Google Group as well.

It’s because of a wacky hack that’s part of Machinist that overrides Module.name so you can do Sham.name, but ZenTest expects Module.name to do what it does normally.

I have a fix for this.
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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

Rails controllers can get out of hand if you’re not very careful. Skinny Controller Fat Model is a great start. But what about handling errors? Isn’t it enough to just let Rails catch your exception and show a 500 Server Error page?

No, it’s not. Falling back on 500 Server Error for everything outside of the “happy path” through your code is sloppy coding.
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I had some problems with a view in a Rails app that was conditionally hiding a Google Map that was generated using the YM4R plugin. I don’t usually test views in unit tests, and this logic depended on a particular situation with the data behind the view, so I decided that this would be a good candidate for a Cucumber feature.

Here’s the Cucumber step implementation I wrote.
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