I love nifty tools. One of my favorite things about attending a conference is finding out about the latest cool tools that I haven't discovered on my own. Here are a few to look into.
Day 1:
workingwithrails.com - a directory of rails developers
Amazon EC2 - Amazon's grid computing service, start Linux clusters on demand
HomeMarks - very slick Ajax bookmark manager, written by one of the conference attendees using Rails
happycodr.com - a showcase site for Rails apps
rspec - Behavior Driven Development in Ruby, sort of a declarative unit testing framework
mule - another goodie from codehaus, an open source Java Enterprise Service Bus implementation
revolutionhealth - perhaps one of the largest Rails apps currently in production, from AOL's Steve Case
Day 2:
slicehost - Xen VPS hosting, only 256MB of RAM for only $20/month
witch for OS X - window switching for keyboard lovers
flexmock and flexstub - from Rails committer Jim Weirich, mock objects for Ruby
Selenium IDE - a Firefox plugin for working with the Selenium web testing framework
watir - a web testing framework in Ruby
zentest - not quite sure what this does, but one conference attendee was very adamant about this testing tool
Day 3:
visor - a drop-down terminal for OS X, a la Quake
Streamlined - a rich Rails view generator, sort of like scaffolding on steroids
deprec - a set of canned scripts for setting up a standard Ubuntu server with Rails
For mock objects in Ruby, the Mocha gem is by far the best mocking library I have used (http://mocha.rubyforge.org/). It's big wins are:
* you can mock methods on real classes, not just mock classes
* you can mock "any instance" of a class, making it possible to test code that does not use dependency injection
* you don't have to check expectations - they are automatically checked when the expectation goes out of scope.
Mocha is well worth exploring.
Posted by: Haakon | January 31, 2007 at 03:18 AM
Hi Ken - let us know if we can answer any questions for you.
Posted by: slicematt | January 31, 2007 at 04:25 PM
just heard about deprec. Cool. Ubuntu... mmmmm...
that visor app sounds cool. downloading now.
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