Thu, 23 Oct 2008

Rails Rumble 2008: Developing Run.Track.Run.

Leah Welty-Rieger joined Obtiva a couple months ago. She is an apprentice in our Software Studio. (She also recently earned her PhD in Particle Physics from Indiana University.) About a month or so ago, Leah and I were walking back from lunch and started talking about our shared interest in running. Then she told me about an idea she had for making simpler, easier, more informative running software for planning and tracking your training. A couple weeks later I found a link to Rails Rumble 2008. I'd wanted to rumble in the past, because I'm a fairly speedy programmer, and I love competition. But having very little CSS-fu and lacking any inspired 48-hour-sized ideas, I'd never rumbled. Until this year. I immediately thought of Leah's idea and realized that with the addition of CSS-ninja Dan Nawara to our Studio team, we had sufficient skills to rumble. And just because I had the luxury of doing so, I asked Fred Polgardy to join us as well, because, well, Fred's a genius, particularly with JavaScript.

We got together 3 times before the competition to formulate our plan of attack. This helped us start on the same page. We understood the domain model (Users have Runs have Splits), and we knew we were going to integrate with the Garmin Forerunner, and we knew we were going to use Flotr to build the HTML-canvas-based graphs that Leah had specified. We decided to use HAML and SASS, which I had never used, but found perfectly intuitive and productive (and now prefer it). I decided to stick with good old test/unit for TDD. I'm still much more productive in test/unit than any other Ruby testing framework and I needed something dead simple since I was going to be running low on energy. I also planned to use TDD strategically. Basically, I used it to test my models, but developed my controllers without tests. Ironically, this helped keep my controllers really skinny, since I ended up extracting logic into models (such as the Garmin XML file processing and matching scheduled runs to actual runs) and wrapping them in tests. We also decided on the name for the app: Run.Track.Run. We were both excited and disappointed to find out a day later that Relevance had created Run Code Run and would be offering free continuous integration for rumblers, and thereby leading everyone to assume that we copied their name.

The competition started on Friday at 7pm Chicago time. My wife, kids, and I with friends in their house. I rudely, and suddenly grabbed my laptop and bluetooth-enabled modem/mobile-phone and started the process of setting up our github repository with Bort, installed Debian on Linode (with Apache+Passenger, MySQL, Postfix), hooked our build into Run Code Run, and pushed our first Capistrano deployment up to the server. The next morning the 4 of us met at the office and started rumbling as a team. The rest of the story is actually pretty mundane. I got really pissed off, swearing loudly at the Garmin JavaScript libraries for a while until Fred came over and solved the problem. We did a lot of pair programming. And mostly just kicked ass consistently for 48 hours. I got to pair with Leah, Dan and Fred (sorted in order of amount of pairing time). I think everyone paired with everyone. And everyone got enough sleep. And with an hour to go, we were kicking back with beer and making final tweaks. In the end, we launched Run.Track.Run., which I'm particularly excited about, since I'm one of the (currently) 75 runners who are already using the application.

[/projects/runtrackrun] permanent link

Fri, 25 Apr 2008

Tweet Nodes

I ripped the WordNet server-side integration out of The Lightweight Visual Thesaurus and shoved in the Twitter API to create Tweet Nodes. It's still at total hack and only works on Firefox, but it's a fun little Twitter conversation browser.

Here's how olabini's Tweet Nodes look today...

[/projects/tweet_nodes] permanent link

Wed, 10 Jan 2007

SafariWatir on iPhone?

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Wed, 03 Jan 2007

assert_select for Watir

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'

class GettingStartedTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  include WatirOnRails
  
  def test_getting_started
    browser = open_browser("/")
    assert_select "div#getting-started h1", "Getting started"
    assert_tag :tag => "h1", :content => "Getting started",
               :parent => { :tag => "div", :attributes => { :id => "getting-started"} }
  end
end

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Reviving the Lightweight Visual Thesaurus

[/projects/lvt] permanent link

Wed, 06 Dec 2006

SafariWatir Screencast

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Wed, 22 Nov 2006

SafariWatir 0.2.0

Hamish released the first rb-appscript gem, paving the way for the new and improved SafariWatir. Now with non-sluggish performance! Seriously, my regression test script runs ridiculously fast on my MacBook Pro compared to previous versions of SafariWatir.

This performance boost comes as no surprise. Up until now I was doing the simplest most naive (and slowest) thing that could possible work by using backticks to invoke AppleScript from the command line...

`osascript <<SCRIPT
tell application "Safari"
  do JavaScript "#{script}" in document 1
end tell
SCRIPT`.chomp

This got me started, but it turns out that using an Apple Event bridge like rb-appscript is more natural, and so much faster...

app = AS.app("Safari")
document = app.documents[1]
app.do_JavaScript(script, :in => document)

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Mon, 16 Oct 2006

Bye-Bye AppleScript, Hello Apple Events, Thanks Hamish

A release should be out soon, right after Hamish and I sort out some annoying warnings being spewed out somewhere in the depths of his magical modules.

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Fri, 13 Oct 2006

SafariWatir 0.1.2

On the plane to San Jose last week I polished off another SafariWatir release. This will likely be the last release for a while. Due to the flooding that we experienced last week, I have become very focused on revenue-generating activities in the short-term. There's nothing like losing 1/3 of your living space and slow-to-respond insurance companies and a family of 5 to support to keep you focused on the bottom line!

This release adds table and frame support, along with improving the click events. Here are some examples of what you can do with SafariWatir at this point...

require 'rubygems'
require 'safariwatir'
require 'test/unit/assertions'
include Test::Unit::Assertions

browser = Watir::Safari.new
browser.goto("http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/")
browser.frame("menu").link(:text, "Books").click
browser.frame("menu").link(:text, /psychology/i).click
assert_match /Silver Anniversary/, browser.frame("content").text

browser.goto("http://basecamphq.com/")
assert_match /What is Basecamp\?/, browser.table(:index, 1)[1][2].text
                                                # First table
browser.close                                   #          First row
                                                #             Second cell
                                                # Yes, Watir uses 1-based indexes.

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Wed, 04 Oct 2006

Rails Seminar Watir on Rails talk cancelled due to Flood

Update: We've received an amazing amount of help and support over the last 24 hours. When I arrived at home today, it was depressing to see a mudpit and a dumpster where our front yard used to be, but it was inspirational to see so many friends and family hard at work getting things cleaned up and dried out. This experience has certainly given Staci and me an opportunity to see things, particularly material things, from a new perspective. At times like this I'm frequently reminded of Jerry's Sage Advice: "It may look like a crisis, but it's only the end of an illusion."

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Thu, 21 Sep 2006

Watir on Rails Update: It's all Relative

class WelcomeTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  include WatirOnRails

  def test_salutation
    browser = open_browser
    browser.goto("/")
    assert_match /Welcome Guest/, browser.div(:id, "banner").text
  end
end

class MyAccountTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  include WatirOnRails
  server "10.2.4.143"
  port 3001

  def test_update_preference
    browser = open_browser("/squirrels/")
    browser.link(:text, /preferences/i).click
    
    browser.text_field(:name, "user").set("dave")
    browser.text_field(:name, "pass").set("test")
    browser.button(:name, "commit").click

    assert_match /<h2>Welcome Dave<\/h2>/, browser.html

    browser.checkbox(:id, "largeFont").set
    browser.button(:name, "commit").click
    
    assert_match /<h1>Welcome Dave<\/h1>/, browser.html
  end
end

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Thu, 07 Sep 2006

Watir on Rails Plugin

After showing some hacked up examples of Watir and Rails integration at RailsConf and last Friday's Ajax on Rails addon, I decided that I was way overdue to venture into the exciting world of Rails Plugins. And just a few hours later, Watir on Rails was born.

Here's a quickstart...

  gem install [safari]watir
  ./script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/watir-on-rails
  ./script/generator watir SuccessfulLogin
  ./script/server -e test
  rake test:watir

One of my goals for this first release was to make Watir on Rails have a similar feel to Rails Integration Tests, which provide a handy open_session method you can use to decorate your session object with a site-specific language. Well, if you know anything about Watir, it should not come as a surprise that Watir on Rails provides an open_browser method that does something similar. You can use open_browser to simply open a browser and use the excellent Watir API, or you can provide an optional block and write Watir on Rails tests methods like this...

  def test_login	
    browser = open_browser
    browser.login_with :username => "dave", :password => "test"
    assert_match /Welcome Dave/, browser.div(:id, "banner").text
  end

  def open_browser
    super do |browser|
      def browser.login_with(args)
        goto("http://localhost:3000/login")
        text_field(:name, "user[name]").set(args[:username])
        password(:name, "user[password]").set(args[:password])
        button(:name, "login").click
      end      
    end
  end

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Mon, 24 Jul 2006

SafariWatir 0.1.1

browser = Watir::Safari.start("http://google.com/")
browser.button(:name, "foo").click
Watir::Exception::UnknownObjectException: Unable to locate Button element with name of foo.
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/safariwatir-0.1.1/./safariwatir/scripter.rb:243:in `execute'
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/safariwatir-0.1.1/./safariwatir/scripter.rb:68:in `highlight'
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/safariwatir-0.1.1/./safariwatir.rb:10:in `click'
        from (irb):4

Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call if you're unable to speak?

You can now interrogate any SafariWatir element ... and it will speak. After you gem install safariwatir, turn up your speakers and try this...

browser = Watir::Safari.start("http://redsquirrel.com/cgi-bin/dave/projects/watir/safari.watir.0.1.1.html")
browser.span(:id, "matrix_quote").speak

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Sun, 23 Jul 2006

Rails Acceptance Testing eBook

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Fri, 21 Jul 2006

SafariWatir 0.1.0

require 'rubygems'
require 'safariwatir'
browser = Watir::Safari.new
browser.goto("http://google.com")
browser.text_field(:name, "q").set("safariwatir")
browser.button(:name, "btnI").click
puts "FAILURE" unless browser.contains_text("Watir on Safari")

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Thu, 20 Jul 2006

Watir at Rails Seminar

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Thu, 13 Jul 2006

SafariWatir in development

If you haven't noticed, I'm a big fan of web testing tools like Selenium and Watir. As I prepared for my RailsConf talk (at RailsConf), surrounded by herds of Macs, I realized that Watir adoption in the Rails community was seriously not going to happen anytime soon without some cross-browser and cross-platform support. Without that support, I continue to recommend Selenium RC or Selenium on Rails to most Rails developers.

And yet I still find myself infatuated with Watir's dead-simple setup (gem install watir and you're done) and intuitive API. So ... <deep-breath/> ... inspired by the Mac-centric tendencies of most of the Rails frontrunners, I have launched the SafariWatir project on RubyForge. There's not very much there yet. You can open and close Safari, fill out text fields, click buttons and links, ask whether the page contains text ... oh, and you can click alert boxes.

I just discovered Apple's GUI Scripting integration with AppleScript, which makes it wonderfully easy to handle things that Windows makes incredibly difficult. (Apple provides GUI Scripting to facilitate universal access.) Watir (for IE) developers, you may want to look away, the following code could hurt...

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Safari"
	tell window 1
		if button named "OK" exists then
			click button named "OK"
		end if
	end tell
end tell

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Sat, 08 Jul 2006

Selenium 0.7 RubyGem Update

As I mentioned in my talk at RailsConf, I needed to update the Selenium RubyGem to get it up-to-date. The gem is now available: gem install selenium. This will give you the latest release (0.7) of Selenium Core. In previous Selenium gems there were a few crufty Ruby files in there, but these have now been extracted to Selenium Remote Control.

This update is mostly for Jonas and Bret.

[/projects/selenium] permanent link

Thu, 15 Jun 2006

My Canvas/Ajax articles in Russian

[/projects] permanent link

Thu, 11 May 2006

The Interactive Canvas on XML.com

[/projects/interactivecanvas] permanent link

Tue, 02 May 2006

Selenium 0.6 RubyGem Update

[/projects/selenium] permanent link

Tue, 25 Apr 2006

Watir, the Lazy Programmer's Friend

My current client was in need of a functional test suite for their web site to raise our confidence that we wouldn't break anything when we upgraded to Hibernate 3. Despite being a Selenium fan, I wanted to give Watir a try (for various reasons, it felt like a good fit). People were hesitant about the introduction of a new language (Watir is a web testing DSL in Ruby), but after I spent a day getting a bunch of test scenarios scripted, Watir proved its worth. Every developer I paired with said the same thing: "I'm never going to type into a browser again."

There were things I could do with Watir that I would be hard pressed to do with Selenium, like outsmarting CAPTCHA, abstracting common code by opening Watir::IE, and switching between dev, test, and staging by changing a single variable. That last point is one of the big wins of Watir over Selenium, you never touch the server, it's dead simple to setup. That said, the achilles heel of Watir is that it currently only runs on Windows and IE, while Selenium runs virtually anywhere on any browser. So I'll stick with Selenium for my Rails project on my MacBook, while Watir seems to be a good fit for our Windows workstations at my client site.

Abstracting common code into Watir::IE has worked beautifully so far. We created a WatirHelper module that includes code like this:

module Watir
  class IE
    def login_admin
      text_field(:name, "name").set("jerryQ")
      text_field(:name, "pass").set("bletch")
      button(:name, "Sumbit").click
    end

    def fill_out_problem_form(last_name, email)
      select_list(:name , "dateMonth").select("December")
      select_list(:name , "dateDay").select("25")
      select_list(:name , "dateYear").select("2008")
      
      text_field(:name, "firstName").set("F")
      text_field(:name, "lastName").set(last_name)
      text_field(:name, "email").set(email)
      text_field(:name, "confirmEmail").set(email)
    end
  end
end

require 'watir'
require 'watir_helper'
include Watir

# update this to point to any server you want
server_name = "localhost" 

ie = IE.new
ie.goto("http://#{server_name}/admin")
ie.login_admin
ie.link(:text, "Tell us your problem").click
ie.fill_out_problem_form("Foo", "foo@bar.org")
...
assert ...

But then I got tired of running scripts. I wanted a Watir dashboard. Ruby/Tk to the rescue! Here's my quick spike of how to drive Watir from a GUI.

require 'tk'
require 'watir_helper'

root = TkRoot.new { title "Dashboard" }
button = TkButton.new(root) do
  text "Start Google"
  command proc do
    ie = IE.new
    ie.goto("http://google.com/")
  end
end
button.pack
Tk.mainloop

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Mon, 17 Apr 2006

The Interactive Canvas and Internet Explorer

[/projects/interactivecanvas] permanent link

Thu, 30 Mar 2006

Google puts Canvas on IE: The Game Changer

• My Ajax Trains Demo
• Rafael Robayna's Canvas Painter
• Bejamin Joffe's *amazing* Canvascape 3D walker

[/projects/ajaxtrains] permanent link

Fri, 24 Mar 2006

Using Rails as Javascript Scaffolding

[/projects/beratings] permanent link

Fri, 17 Mar 2006

Selenium at RailsConf

[/projects/selenium] permanent link

Mon, 13 Feb 2006

Canvas Directed Graph Library: webdep

[/projects/webdep] permanent link

Thu, 19 Jan 2006

Canvas, Ajax, and the Supertrain: Reloaded

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion. I am very thankful. --The Mythical Man Month, p. 291

[/projects/ajaxtrains] permanent link

Sat, 14 Jan 2006

Lightweight Visual Thesaurus v0.2

[/projects/lvt] permanent link

Fri, 23 Dec 2005

Canvas, Ajax, and the Supertrain

[/projects/ajaxtrains] permanent link