Joe MooreJoe Moore
Desert 0.5.2 Released
edit Posted by Joe Moore on Thursday August 27, 2009 at 07:30AM

Desert 0.5.2 focuses on speed improvements and bug bixes.

Pivotal Tracker Stories:

Joe MooreJoe Moore
Testing Desert Plugins in Isolation
edit Posted by Joe Moore on Saturday August 22, 2009 at 11:37AM

At Pivotal, some of our client projects use plugins from our home-grown social networking platform and rely on Desert to tie them all together. To test this package of plugins we created a project that contains all of our Desert plugins and wrote some rake tasks that run all of their tests. Great, right?

Mostly. We want to ensure that our plugins have the absolute minimum dependencies to function. Let's pretend we have an UserAuth plugin and a SocialPivots plugin, where UserAuth has no dependencies, but SocialPivots depends on UserAuth. We would like to test these the to plugins in isolation. But, with Desert doing it's job so well, our UserAuth plugin could have a dependency on the SocialPivots plugins' models or tables and we would never know it. Everything from SocialPivots is mixed-in and loaded into memory, and all of its migrations have executed, at the time we are running UserAuth's tests.

What we need is a way to tell Desert to load only the plugin under test, plus its dependencies listed in init.rb. Hacking Desert and Rails to allow us to specify which plugins to load turned out to be pretty easy. Check it out (full gist here):

Ryan DyRyan Dy
Standup 02/18/2009
edit Posted by Ryan Dy on Thursday February 19, 2009 at 06:37AM

We're looking for more information about Taste or other similar kinds of suggestion engines. What kind of experiences have people had integrating these tools into Rails applications. Are there other useful engines worth looking at?

Direct uploads to Amazon S3 service can be serviced by EC2 servers; however, there might be more direct ways of doings this with S3.

Newer versions of RubyMine have been reported having problems running the gem version of rspec but a solutions has been found. The problem comes from the way gems are specified in RubyMine. You need to add the rspec gem you are using to the Project Structure >> Ruby SDK and Gems.

Using Desert and exception notifier can cause some slow startup times. If you are seeing this problem try moving exception notifier's sender_address inside your environment's post-load block.