A Look Back At Past Posts

Noel Rappin, Friday, October 3, 2008 @ 11:09 am

Updates to past posts:

TankEngine

Thanks to Gregg and Jason at RailsEnvy for mentioning TankEngine on their podcast. The git repository now has 54 watchers and 3 forks. Thanks, everybody who is watching. I'm hoping for some updates soon.

Plugin testing

This is always what I'm afraid of, I write a big post on something, then a commenter points out a plugin that already does it reasonably well. In this case, the commenter mentioned the plugin_test_helper library, which allows you to pretty easily include a Rails environment inside your plugin for testing. The only problem I had with it is that if you have an actual application has this plugin installed, it seems to do odd things to the environment load -- I wound up limiting the init.rb of the plugin to only do something if the RAILS_ENV was specifically set to test plugins.

REST

After being a little cranky about REST a few weeks ago, I wound up doing some much stricter REST development on part of a new project. The one addition I'd like to make to the previous post is that REST is a very useful abstraction for determining when you need to split off functionality into another controller.

In particular, when you start adding methods to an existing controller with names like "add_subfeature" or "list_subfeature" your code is probably trying to tell you to split off to another RESTful controller, where you can call those things "create" and "index".

I should also mention, with respect to the topic of the last post, that it is possible to include Ajax features within the standard REST methods by triggering different respond_to blocks. That works to a point, but can eventually lead to the kind of bloated controller methods that REST was supposed to avoid.

Project Post-Mortem

The project that included integrated design drafts, named-scope based reporting, and aggressive markup in the helpers had it's post-mortem this week. It was interesting to see how these sort-of prototype structures worked in the context of the larger team project.

On the plus side, everybody seemed to like the integrated design materials, even with the sort of rickety implementation described in the blog post. The designers liked being able to easily integrate wireframes with actual site material, the programmers liked seeing the wireframes as they were working on the real site.

I think the named-scope stuff was basically liked, but the common Ajax controller that I created to manage it across various resources was, I think, generally understood to be "weird", "non-standard", and "probably not the best way to structure the problem".

The HTML markup in the helper files was not liked very much by the rest of the team. Everybody felt it was kind of hard to find where code was, and also that it was harder to modify than traditional ERb. I still think the mechanism has some use as a replacement for content_tag, but it probably needs to be better integrated with the existing partials system for better usage. So I guess we're still looking for the best way to untangle complicated markup.

agile ajax

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