CodeGear: Red Diamond Non-Disclosable

Well, in order to download a Beta for CodeGear's Ruby IDE (based on DLTK, code-named Red Diamond), I have to agree not to disclose information about it, including its existence and features. So instead of telling you about it, and how much it adds on top of DLTK, I will, instead, pretend it doesn't exist. If you ask me to suggest an IDE for Ruby code, I will not mention this one, even if it's better. That's what they want.

Eclipse: Go to Implementation

I've been pairing with one of my colleagues at The FeedRoom today (hi, Ivan!), and he passed on a plugin I've failed to notice before: Implementors.

Basically, it allows you to jump to the implementation of a method; really handy when you've got Interface/Implementation splits in your code and you know a particular method falls into that bucket, and you want to go to its implementation rather than the interface your code points to.

If there's more than one implementation, it brings up a context-menu of all the implementations it can find. If the interface in question is, say, java.util.List, this can take a while, so be patient.

Really handy; I imagine I'll be using that a lot.

Ruby on Rails on Bamboo: Unit Tests

In my previous post about Continuously Integrating Ruby on Rails with Bamboo, I walked through a simple setup for a Ruby on Rails project in Bamboo. That setup is a good starting point, but it's missing useful elements, like understanding the unit tests within the project, and test coverage:


Unit Testing Ruby on Rails with Bamboo
Let's start with unit tests. Bamboo understands the JUnit XML format, which Ruby doesn't normally emit (what with not using JUnit and all). Fortunately, someone's written a Rails plugin called ci_reporter that emits these files for us.

$ gem install ci_reporter
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Successfully installed ci_reporter-1.3.3
Installing ri documentation for ci_reporter-1.3.3...
Installing RDoc documentation for ci_reporter-1.3.3...
$ script/plugin install http://svn.caldersphere.net/svn/main/plugins/ci_reporter
+ ./ci_reporter/tasks/ci_reporter.rake
$ svn add vendor/plugins/ci_reporter/
A         vendor/plugins/ci_reporter
A         vendor/plugins/ci_reporter/tasks
A         vendor/plugins/ci_reporter/tasks/ci_reporter.rake
$ svn ci -m "Added CI reporter to project."
Adding         vendor/plugins/ci_reporter
Adding         vendor/plugins/ci_reporter/tasks
Adding         vendor/plugins/ci_reporter/tasks/ci_reporter.rake
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 411.

You'll probably have to ensure the ci_reporter gem is installed on your instance of Bamboo as well. Once this is complete, you'll want to modify your Plan:



And build the project:


See? Tests! Bamboo can find the XML files generated in test/reports, and use them to understand the testing of your Ruby on Rails application. Now, in a Java/JUnit project, Bamboo does a fine job of turning the test methods into readable names, but for now that's not true with Test::Unit test names, but they're working on it.


Next step: Coverage. But that'll be another day.

Hpricot Limitations

Well, after fighting with Cygwin and Hpricot for a few days, I've given in and dropped Cygwin from my stack for the Ruby/Windows testing for now.

Within five minutes of doing that, I was able to get something done with Hpricot, and bump into its limitations within a minute or so after that.

For example:

irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
=> false

irb(main):002:0> require 'hpricot'
=> true

irb(main):003:0> require 'open-uri'
=> true

irb(main):004:0> doc = Hpricot(open("http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/wi
ki/HpricotBasics"))
=> #<Hpricot::Doc {doctype "<!DOCTYPE html\n" "    PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.

...

"> "http://trac.edgewall.com/" </a>} "\n " </p>} "\n" </div>} "\n\n\n\n "} </bod
y>} "\n" </html>} "\n\n">

irb(main):005:0> (doc/"//img")
=> #<Hpricot::Elements[{emptyelem <img src="/hpricot/chrome/site/images/hpricot-
small.png" alt="hpricot">}, {emptyelem <img src="/hpricot/chrome/common/trac_log
o_mini.png" height="30" alt="Trac Powered" width="107">}]>

irb(main):006:0> (doc/"//img[@alt='hpricot'")
=> #<Hpricot::Elements[{emptyelem <img src="/hpricot/chrome/site/images/hpricot-
small.png" alt="hpricot">}, {emptyelem <img src="/hpricot/chrome/common/trac_log
o_mini.png" height="30" alt="Trac Powered" width="107">}]>

irb(main):007:0> (doc/"//img[@alt='hpricot']")
=> #<Hpricot::Elements[{emptyelem <img src="/hpricot/chrome/site/images/hpricot-
small.png" alt="hpricot">}]>

irb(main):008:0> (doc/"//a/img[@alt='hpricot']")
=> #<Hpricot::Elements[{emptyelem <img src="/hpricot/chrome/site/images/hpricot-
small.png" alt="hpricot">}]>

irb(main):009:0> (doc/"//a[img/@alt='hpricot']")
=> #<Hpricot::Elements[]>

There's nothing wrong with the second query; it's a valid XPath expression, it's just not supported by jQuery, which means it isn't supported by Hpricot. Too bad; I guess i'll have to work around the syntax limitations.