Spring is in the air here in sunny NYC! Well, it was sunny for a bit. Now it’s turned into that classic film-noir drizzle. That’s authentic New York weather outside our window as we do the Round Up!

Ask for Help

• I asked, “In Jasmine, how do you spy on a constructor?” Suppose you have a constructor called Widget. Saying spyOn(window, "Widget") swaps out the real Widget function with a spy. The real Widget implementation takes its prototype with it, which means that Widgets created while the constructor is spied on don’t get the methods a Widget would get. That’s true even when you spy with spyOn(window, "Widget").andCallThrough().

  Also, there doesn’t seem to be a way to stub out object construction and return an object of your choosing. In Rspec in Ruby you can say,

  Widget.should_receive(:new).and_return(my_fake_widget)

  because .new is a class method. But in Javascript, new is a keyword which always creates a new object. I’m guessing there’s no good way around this, but if there is one, we could really use it.

  Update: This is, as it turns out, entirely incorrect. Jasmine’s .andReturn() does let you stub constructors properly. I still have no idea how this works. See the comments for more discussion.

Interesting Stuff

• Todd notifies us that in ActiveRecord, dynamic finders with too-few arguments fail silently. That is, if you say,

  Person.find_by_first_name_and_last_name_and_email(”Todd”, “Persen”)

  and fail to specify a value for email, the value is taken to be nil. That means that the finder will look for someone named “Todd Persen” with a nil email address. You might have meant that. More likely, you made a mistake. AR should probably check the number of arguments it’s given against the number of columns in the finder name.

• You already know that Pivotal does real Extreme Programming. But did you know that we have…Extreme Breakfast?