Interesting

• We've created a Pivotal fork of the Ctags bundle for TextMate (the original).

  Ctags provides a mechanism for indexing your source code files for the purpose of locating and navigating between bits of code; something IntelliJ/RubyMine is very good at, while TextMate is found lacking.

  The forked bundle aims to be more inline with Pivotal practices, where developers are often switching between IDE/editor worlds. For example, code completion has been re-mapped to ctrl-space, to be more like IntelliJ.

  Have you played with Ctags? Take a look at the bundle; see what you think.

Help Wanted

• We're on the hunt for quality burritos in NYC. Ben gave Burrito Loco a try last night; thought the burritos were "supple". Dave is desperately seeking breakfast burritos.

  Suggestions?

Interesting

• Ben noted, you can give your Ruby command-line tools some (RDoc::)usage
• Rails Boost, where one may "generate a ... bootstrapped Rails app", now includes fixjour as an option to the generator
• Joe and Ryan recently created a Pivotal fork of Pat's acts_as_fu to get it to play nicely with your application and its database connections

Help Wanted

• We're interested in running some sort of javascript validation and syntax checking suite on one of our projects. JSLint looks reasonable for the framework and can be run from the command line with Rhino.

  If you have experience with or thoughts about the idea, please share.

Interesting Things

• An EngineYard-hosted project had an issue with monit attempting to restart mongrel too often. It turned out that the mongrel processes were not dropping pid files soon enough. The EngineYard-suggested fix:

  • Upgrade mongrel to 1.1.5.1 (patched to drop the pid file faster)
  • Upgrade to monit 5.0 beta 6
  • Update to the latest ey-monit-scripts
• FiveRuns dash is a cool, customizable metrics service. Pat created a plug-in for sending continuous integration stats there: dash-ci.

• Using Cucumber to test Capistrano deployment:

  cap --dry-run will run Capistrano without completing the actual task (e.g., deployment). Cucumber can then be used to write some nice, story-like deployment expectations that search the Capistrano output to document your project's deployment process and ensure the documentation remains valid. Something like:

  Feature: Deployment
    In order to deploy the application
    As an administrator
    I should run Capistrano commands
  
  
    Scenario: Deploying
      Given I am working from the RAILS_ROOT directory
        And the parent directory is a Git repository
      When  I run a deployment task
      Then  'scm_user' for the deployment should be derived from the Git config for the remote origin
  
  
    Scenario: Deploying to demo
      Given I am working from the RAILS_ROOT directory
      When  I run 'cap demo deploy'
      Then  the deploy should succeed
        And the deployed code matches the latest 'web/stable' tag
        And the deployed code should be marked with a new 'web/demo' tag
  

  More on this to come.

• Using Selenium to ensure unique IDs in your DOM:

  # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  # The examples below illustrate the technique with the Prototype and
  # jQuery libraries, respectively.  Both use Pat Nakajima's selenium
  # helper for executing javascript in the tested browser window.
  # 
  # For more on that helper, see:
  # http://pivotallabs.com/users/patn/blog/articles/717-run-javascript-in-selenium-tests-easily-
  # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  
  # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  # with prototype
  # note the exception catching... prototype chokes on invalid IDs
  # e.g., "invalid_id[][]"
  # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  def assert_unique_ids
    audit_json = run_javascript <<-JS
      audit_ids = function() {
        var results = {};
        $A($$('*[id]')).each(function(element) {
          if(element.id.replace(' ', '').length > 0) {
            try {
              if($$('#' + element.id ).length > 1) {
                if( ! results.duplicates) {
                  results.duplicates = {};
                }
                var count = results.duplicates[element.id] || 0;
                count ++;
                results.duplicates[element.id] = count;
              }
            }
            catch(err) {
              // uncomment to capture invalid IDs
              // var invalid = results.invalid || [];
              // invalid.push(element.id);
              // results.invalid = invalid;
            }
          }
        });
        return ($H(results).toJSON());
      }
      audit_ids();
    JS
    assert_equal({}, JSON.parse(audit_json)), 'Expected no duplicate IDs')
  end
  
  
  # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  # with jQuery
  # additionally depends on the jquery-json plugin:
  # http://code.google.com/p/jquery-json/
  # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  def assert_unique_ids
    audit_json = run_javascript <<-JS
      audit_ids = function() {
        var results = {};
        $('*[id]').each(function() {
          if(this.id.replace(' ', '').length > 0) {
            if($('*[id=' + this.id + ']').length > 1) {
              if( ! results.duplicates) {
                results.duplicates = {};
              }
              var count = results.duplicates[this.id] || 0;
              count ++;
              results.duplicates[this.id] = count;
            }
          }
        });
        return $.toJSON(results);
      }
      audit_ids();
    JS
    assert_equal({}, JSON.parse(audit_json)), 'Expected no duplicate IDs')
  end
  

Help Wanted

• One project recently moved from Rimu to EngineYard, only to find their Mongrel processes double in memory consumption. Any thoughts on why?