The San Francisco Ruby Meetup Group

July Pivots Around Pivotal

July 15, 2009 · 6:00 PM
Pivotal Labs HQ

Many thanks to Josh Susser and Pivotal Labs for hosting our venue this month.

Sarah Mei's Slidedown talk has been rescheduled for August. Instead, we'll have Zach Brock. This is an evening of tests, tests, and more tests.

PRESENTATIONS

TDD by Zach Brock
Not really sure about this whole TDD thing you've heard about? Never really seen it in action and curious about how to do it? Zach Brock will run through a quick TDD demo with Rails and Rspec to give you an idea of what it's about, how to do it and how it can help you to write better and cleaner code.

Cucumber 101 by Russell Taga
Cucumber 101 - Looking to automate your functional/integration testing? Heard of cucumber, but haven't had time to play with it? This session will introduce you to the framework and walk you through the basics of setting up cucumber for your app and writing some simple tests to help get you on your way.

Rails Webservices APIs and always up-to-date documentation with Cucumber by Sarah Allen and Wolfram Arnold
Using cucumber to describe your Webservices XML APIs, you can make sure that your docs are never out of date because they also serve as executable tests. In this talk we'll show how to use Rails xml builder views to create maintainable APIs. APIs are analogous to the human interface: they provide an interface for other software to interact with. As such, APIs should not be implemented with a to_xml method on your model, but rather be a part of your view layer.

Please email me if you have a Presentation or Lightning Talk.

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Sean Cashin

Very informative. The talks were kept on point and the questions were answered thoughtfully.

0 · July 16, 2009
Tom Voltz

Sara and Wolfram did a really great job and had clearly put a lot of effort into their presentation which in itself was quite interesting - to resolve a communications and documentation business problem, they put cucumber on steriods - to 1.) publish features as part of documentation for developers, and provide links in the cucumber code to allow them to provide more details of the spec (in this case, xml files that were either consumed or generated.

The other two presenters were also very well prepared, and had very good examples of what they were trying to present. Both were introductory talks about rspec and cucumber. Nice to have them back to back, since the second one focused on cucumber, but also showed the rspec "phase" of the red/green/refactor cycle.

0 · July 15, 2009