Ruby

Rails Development Sucks on Windows

It takes almost ten seconds to start a Rails test on my Windows XP box. The test may report that it took it a fraction of a second to run, but it actually takes about ten seconds for it to start. The Rails Console and Mongrel have the same problem, but I can deal with that. However, with unit tests, it's not acceptable because rapid feedback from tests is the key to rapid development.I've had JUnit tests using Spring and Hibernate that start faster than this. And in Java, incremental compilers (for example, the one that comes with Eclipse) tell me immediately when I've stuffed up syntax. With interpreted Ruby on Rails, I have to wait ten seconds just to be told that I've made a typo.To experience the problem, all I have to do is create a new Rails project, create a single model, and then run the test for that model. It takes ten seconds to start the test, give or take a second or so. Trying JRuby is not an option at this stage because at the end of the day I need to use ferret on my project, which requires native C extensions.

In Praise of Synergy

No, I don't mean the buzzword gone bad - I mean Synergy; the software that, in its own words:

lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware

We're working on a Rails app at Shine that we need to test on both Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Furthermore, developing Rails kind of sucks on Windows (which is another story I promise that I'll go into some other time), so I develop on a Mac. So I actually have 3 PCs on my desk - my laptop (which runs IE 6 and contains all my mail), an iMac, and another PC that runs IE 7. Running them all from different keyboards and mice would be a nightmare. So I hooked 'em all together using Synergy.

YAML in YAML Fixtures

We were faced with the interesting problem of having a database column that stored YAML representations of data. To be more precise, that wasn't the problem, it was how to load YAML data in using Rails fixtures, which themselves are in YAML (or CSV, but we prefer YAML).After the usual Googling, I eventually found a few sites that gave me some hints. Apologies for not referencing those sites but now can't find them again (and it took me a couple of hours the first time). So, in the hope that others who follow behind me have another source of assistance I thought it would be useful to blog it here.