The RubyConf preliminary agenda has been posted, and it looks like a really outstanding lineup!
Even better (for me, at least), is the fact that I’ve already been privileged enough to see some of these talks at the Ruby Hoedown, so I don’t feel quite as bad about having to pick and choose which afternoon sessions I’d like to attend. For those who weren’t lucky enough to make it to the Hoedown, I’d especially recommend Jay Phillips’ talk on Adhearsion. Not only were we all on the edge of our collective seat listening to him, he spent the remainder of the Hoedown with a cloud of people constantly hovering around him, peppering him with questions and was gracious enough to make sure he answered everything we could throw at him.
I’d say the feature I’m most excited about, though, is “Room 3.” I think that offering a more freeform ‘workshop’ environment is a great idea, and I’m going to have to watch my time carefully, because I can definitely see myself accidentally missing sessions I’d like to attend due to spending too long in Room 3.
Online Registration is now open, $250 per person (since the site wasn’t exactly clear on the price unless you click around a bit).
Well, we’re just past the 14 hour mark since the Rails Rumble opened, and we’re making great progress. Keith Medlin and I have resurrected the “Red Key” brand to bring our revolutionary vision to life: Doxtrackr, a web-based document revision system.
The bulk of my time so far has been spent setting up our deployment environment, having done this recently for Alloy Code and Your Garage Online, I was able to speed through most of it. We’re using Mongrel, Capistrano and Nginx on Ubuntu 7.04 (breaking from the Debian herd) and have our stack already in place. We won’t be struggling to deploy at the last minute!
Keith has been focusing on our design and interface while I’ve been putting the models in place to support the site. We’ve snapped a few photos for posterity.
Keep watching for previews of our design and code process!
Inspired by City Cliq’s RSpec screenshot, we wanted to brag on our 100% RCov coverage as well. We’ve been using Test::Unit as opposed to RSpec, along with a healthy dose of Mocha to mock out external services.
For example, our application provides a convenient, tiny url to access user content, which is generated as part of a create action, generated with the ShortURL gem. In our functional test, we mock out the “shorten” method of ShortURL, and have it feed us back consistent data:
def test_create
WWW::ShortURL.expects(:shorten).returns("http://tinyurl.com/fake")
assert_difference "Document.count", 1 do
post :create, :document => @@document_default_values
assert_equal "http://tinyurl.com/fake", assigns(:document).shorturl
end
end
Since the generated URL could potentially be different each time the test is run, I’ve removed the dependency on an external library and service to gain repeatability in my tests. I’ll take for granted that the ShortURL gem works and has it’s own tests; there’s no reason for me to duplicate their efforts. The above test simply assumes the ShortURL library is performing as expected, and allowing me to test my own code atomically.
Well, I’m long overdue for a Rumble update, the past 24 hours have been a whirlwind of activity over at team Redkey. Our application now supports team collaboration, ActionMailer backed email, and some really cool routing stuff that enables us to use the concept of users without the overhead of making those users log in.
Also, don’t forget to check out our Flickr photos. We were fortunate enough to have a guest photographer stop by the morning to take our official team photo, capturing us at our most-rested state in the past day and a half.
After a turbo-charged 48 hour development period, our contest entry has launched! Keith did an outstanding job on our interface, far exceeding merely doing justice to my application code. Even more impressive, we managed to implement everything we intended, and simplified the app at the same time.
Here’s the short list of features:
+ No Account Management Required!
+ Easy to share private URLs
+ Document Version & Status Tracking
+ Version specific Comments
I would argue that our greatest success was removing the account management requirement. Most of the Rumble contest sites we’ve viewed so far put the majority of their content behind a login/password screen. A few of the more generous ones support OpenID, a technology I’ve recently come to embrace.
We take pride in being one of the few applications that offers all the benefit of a session-backed user account without any of the account creation/management overhead. Simply provide your name and email address when you upload a document and your account is created for you. If you’ve uploaded additional documents with the same email address, we’ll automatically group them together for you.
