Ask for Help

“Does anyone have experience with the parallel_specs plugin?”

One team member has begun experimenting with the Parallel Specs plugin. This plugin allows your testing framework (RSPec, Test::Unit and Cucumber) to use any additional CPUs which your machine may have. Initial usage suggests that this dramatically reduces testing time.

“geminstaller.install breaks Passenger”

This references a help from Friday. geminstaller.install works fine when using Mongrel, but it breaks Passenger.

Interesting Things

• Some team members have begun using KeyCastr while pairing. This app displays your keystrokes in a small floating window. It is especially useful if you use a lot of macros while coding.

• Rails 2.3 & JSON. One team member noticed some gotchas with Rails 2.3 and JSON which seem to also be described here.

• Rails 2.3 now lazy-loads sessions. This can be a problem, though, if you want to truly disable sessions on a site.

• The Formtastic plugin has been getting great reviews from team members. It describes itself as “a Rails FormBuilder DSL (with some other goodies) to make it far easier to create beautiful, semantically rich, syntactically awesome, readily stylable and wonderfully accessible HTML forms in your Rails applications.”