The more I think about it, the more I think that we need controller tests in Rails that don’t render. Functional tests just don’t cut it if you’ve got anything non-trivial in either the controller actions or the view. I know we should be aiming for simplicity in precisely those places, but sometimes you just can’t distill everything into a fat model.
Looks like I’m not going to be using restful_authentication on this project. The instructions are convoluted, and what you end up with doesn’t test cleanly. Can’t be bothered with that. While I’m in learn-mode, authlogic looks like a better bet; I also like the fact that someone else has realised that model > ORM model.
Yup, that pretty much sums it up.
I’ve been fairly thoroughly exposed to Darcs, Mercurial, Git and Subversion now. The problems I’ve had have been hashed over in a thousand blog posts by others who tried all this out before me, so I won’t bother with tales of slowness, really slowness, or the revelation of git branching and stashing. Nor will I complain about git’s learning curve.
I just don’t think I’ll be using any of the others except for legacy codebases now. What finally sealed the deal was the realisation that git’s submodules were just svn:externals in disguise. Oh, and the fact that pretty much all the third party code I’m interfacing with these days is on Github.
So… first green fields Major Project in a while. It’s a Rails app, but I’m shifting to PostgreSQL and Amazon EC2/S3 for a bunch of it, so there’s going to be a fair amount of new learnings here.
It also feels slightly odd to be jumping back into Rails again. I’ve not done any new Rails work for a little while; the majority of my consulting has been on apps frozen at 2.1, so it’ll be good to be working on the fresh code-base.
I’ve shut down Other People Work for the next couple of weeks to get this project out of the door, although I reckon that what with various travel and visiting plans, I’ve only got about 2/3rds of that time to play with.
No time to hang around here blogging, there’s work to be done!
I know I shouldn’t leave it so long, but I’ve just updated to WP 2.7.1.
The new admin interface rocks. I could never see the point of the old dashboard, whereas this is actually useful.