Desert 0.5.2 focuses on speed improvements and bug bixes.

Pivotal Tracker Stories:

• "Fix mailer templates -- very slow with Desert": ActionMailer::Base.view_paths are now cached. This speeds up ActionMailer tests/specs.
• "Plugin schema migrations should successfully convert from the 'old' scheme to the 'new' scheme": Pulled cauta/desert at master and fixed specs.
• "Add sweepers to Desert's load path": Pulled willcodeforfoo/desert at master and fixed specs.
• "Specs should handle Rails version incompatibilities"

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):

• JQuery Events/live + ScrewUnit = :-(. ScrewUnit swaps the DOM "out from under" the elements that Events/live is watching, which messes with ScrewUnit. Call die on the DOM elements that live events are watching.

• ScrewUnit + CI + IE = :'-( Also, When ScrewUnit suites become large, they trigger IE's "slow script" warning, which can freeze your continuous integration build. Check out the Registry Hack to set your own timeout.

• We have a fan of Thor in the house: "Map options to a class. Simply create a class with the appropriate annotations, and have options automatically map to functions and parameters." Which, as is (not) obvious, indicates that Thor is a replacement for rake.

Interesting Things

• You can never return: ... except when you can. From a block, that is. Returning from a block rarely works:

  result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
   return x
  end
  => LocalJumpError: unexpected return
  

  But, you can pass next and break arguments, which will allow you to assign return values from the block:

  result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
    break(x)
  end
  => "one"
  
  
  result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
    next(x)
  end
  => ["one", "two"]
  

You can return from a lambda, though.

• Check out Google Page Speed, which is like Yahoo's YSlow, only "better."

  Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

• Like chef? Love capistrano? Check out chef-deploy, which "... Uses the same directory layout as capistrano and steals the git remote cached deploy strategy from cap and adapts it to work without cap and under chef."

• SFTUG FTW! Another successful SF Tracker User Group Meetup on 06/24. Watch for future events on the Meetup site.

Ask for Help

"Does anyone have Nginx URL rewriting fu?"

The pretty documentation is actually quite hard to work with. Does anyone else have a good reference?

Interesting Things

• Pivotal in the New York Times: Regarding Palm Pre development and our own Tweed:

Some developers who were granted early access to Palm's new operating system said it was worth the wait. "We find it's the easiest one to develop for," said Christian Sepulveda, vice president for business development at Pivotal Labs. "It allows for a richer experience, like having a pop-up menu and background processing, which is helpful."

Mr. Sepulveda's company developed four of the first programs available for download through Palm’s app store, including an item for Twitter called Tweed.

• The next SF Ruby Meetup will be held here at Pivotal Labs. Sign up) and attend!
• BART strike warning! In the Bay Area we take our commute options seriously. Here are your options if BART goes on strike

Ask for Help

"Has anyone implemented mutli-table (class table) inheritance in Rails, as apposed to single table inheritance (STI)?"

• There are some plugins that nobody has tried, such as inherits_from
• What about a view to represent the super set of tables and rows?

"We're looking for a dead-simple, drop-in JS rating or 'starting' plugin."

Check out the start-rating jQuery plugin. Any other suggestions?

Interesting Things

• RubyMine 1.1 + Latest Mac OS X Java Upgrade + configuring RubyMine to work with Java 1.6 = Complex FAIL. We downgraded to RubyMine 1.0.5 and it works again.

At Pivotal Labs, our clients, customers, and developers love Pivotal Tracker; after all, we wrote it and selfishly kept it to ourselves for 2 years! With that much history, some of our Tracker projects have built up thousands of stories, and keeping these stories organized is a challenge. Luckily, we designed Tracker with a simple yet powerful organizational tool: Labels. Here are some labeling patterns we find useful.

As web developers in the Web 2.0 world, we work with transparencies and gradients all the time. Sometimes we get a bunch of assets from a designer and can't easily see how the visual assets are constructed: what parts are transparent? Is the background grey or transparent? How drastically does a gradient fade? Get some answers quickly by tweaking OS X Preview.

On April 29, 2009 Pivotal Labs hosted the inaugural San Francisco Pivotal Tracker User's Group. It was a great success! As an avid Pivotal Tracker user (and sometimes developer) for over 3 years I am very interested in making Tracker a better product and teaching others how to use Tracker to improve their organization.

Here are a few thoughts I took away from the meeting, and a few tips and tricks.