Helps

• Using bundler seems to break some Rails plugins which try to extend Rails objects, such as Loofah, and no one is sure why. Probably something in the load order is different. A “workaround” is to find other ways of including functionality in your models, such as including modules in an ApplicationModel base class, which you should probably do anyway. Still, does anyone know what’s going wrong?

• On a few of our Snow Leopard machines, we’ve seen git slow to a crawl. Rebooting seems to fix it temporarily. We haven’t seen it on our Leopard machines. Anyone else seen this or have a fix?

Interesting

• On one of our projects, we have a rake task called deployed:versions which sshes into each of our deployment boxes finds the git version which is deployed, and presents the results in a nice table. It’s been a handy tool, and you may want to write one for yourself, especially if your project deploys to lots of boxes and environments like ours.

• If you’re using Snow Leopard and Firefox 3.6, you may have some issues with sqlite3 (of all things). Sauce Labs have fixed this in their Sauce RC, which is a replacement for Selenium RC. You don’t have to use Sauce RC to get the fix; just download it and replace the JAR files in Selenium RC with theirs.

• Speaking of Selenium did you know it has great drag and drop support? Here’s a Cucumber step for dragging items in a jQuery UI Sortable list:

  When /^I drag “([^"])” above “([^"])”$/ do |dragged_item, dropped_item|
  li = lambda { |text| %{//ul[contains(@class,"ui-sortable")]/li[contains(string(),"#{text}")]} }
  selenium.drag_and_drop_to_object(li[dragged_item], li[dropped_item])
  end

• On one project, have a lot of commits called “WIP” (”Work in progress”). It’s not a very useful message. Some people have taken to squashing their branches into a single commit before they put them on master. When there are lots of commits on a branch, this is also not very useful, as the details of what happened get lost. Instead, we’re striving to give commits good names and not squash them. When we do need to make a WIP commit, such as when we push work in progress at the end of the day, we amend to it later and give it a meaningful name.

  When it’s time to rebase onto master, you can do this:

  code(master)$ git rebase -i origin/master

  That -i means “interactive”. Your editor can open, and you can tell git to squash meaningless commits into other commits they belong with. You’ll get a chance to give the frankensteined beast a new commit message. You can also reorder, skip, or edit commits this way; see git help rebase for details.

Pivotal has recently started experimenting with a service that runs Selenium tests ‘in the cloud’ at saucelabs.com. Sauce Labs was founded by Jason Huggins, the creator of Selenium.

The first question that comes to my mind when such services get mentioned is “do I have to give them a copy of our source code and database so they can run this test for us?”. In the case of Sauce Labs the answer is no. They use a novel architecture that involves a round trip from your test process (e.g. cucumber or something else using selenium-client) to saucelabs.com, where they run a SeleniumRC server and a browser, then back to your machine where your webserver and database are. Something like this:

Of course in the real world we all live behind firewalls, so actually the architecture is slightly more complicated. You setup a reverse SSH tunnel to a machine at Sauce Labs that the Sauce On Demand service then uses to tunnel to your webserver.

Of course inserting this roundtrip across the Internet is not without cost. The penalty of running Selenium tests this way is that they run quite slowly, typically about 3 times slower in my experience. This means that this is not something that individual developers are going to do from their workstations.

However, when you consider the issue of cross-browser testing, this starts to look a lot more attractive. During our continuous integration (CI) testing, we like to test against several different browsers. In the past this has meant complex setups involving virtual machines running Windows and other OSes. With Sauce’, switching OS and browser is simply a matter of tweaking a parameter. For CI builds, speed is not of the utmost importance, so we are willing to trade the cost of maintaining complex and fragile build setups, for a speed penalty.

To ease the integration of this service into Rails projects, we have written a gem, saucelabs-adapter, that will do the necessary tunnel setup/teardown and selenium configuration, automatically as part of a Rails test. Currently it supports Test::Unit using Polonium or Webrat, and JsUnit tests. We haven’t used it with an RSpec project yet, but I suspect that will be an easy integration.

Today we are open-sourcing the saucelabs-adapter gem:

• The code
• Pivotal Tracker project
• Canary CI build that runs once per hour to see if adapter is working and Sauce Labs service is up.
• Canary source code.