Archive for the ‘Testing’ Category

Mock testing with mocha

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

Mocha is a library designed to let you mock objects in your test environment. It’s very useful for testing around external dependencies

Inside one of my controllers I am calling a SOAP Service:

message_result = SOAPService.send_message(message)

This leaves me with a problem in my functional test - external dependencies are not conduive to self-contained test. Enter Mocha to the rescue!

Mocha lets me create a stub for a method on any instance of my object. This means that I can intercept the calls in my test, without needing to touch the code inside my controller.

SOAPService.any_instance.stubs(:send_message).returns( MessageResult.new )
get :respond
assert_match(/1<\/status>/, @response.body)

The get :respond call above would normally invoke a SOAP call, but using any_instance.stubs(:send_message).returns( MessageResult.new ) means that the SOAPService.send_message method now will return a new MessageResult. My controller doesn’t care and now my functional test is tight and focussed, and tests the controller logic without the external dependency being a factor.

Did you find this Ruby on Rails article useful? Why not recommend Toby at Working With Rails?

Posted in Code, Development, Programming, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering, Technology, Testing | No Comments »

Facebook Apps are very hard to debug

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

I am working on a Facebook Application for a client and although the Facebook API itself is rich and elegant, debugging the app is very difficult. Facebook uses it’s own markup called FBML, which is pulled from your app, translated into HTML and Facebook commands and then displayed. This means that applications have to actually run on a remote server that is accesible by the Facebook back-end.

The development process reminds me of the halycon days of my J2EE days (test,fix,build,jar,war,ear,undeploy,waitdeploy,wait,swear):

  1. Make minor change in code
  2. Push the change to the server
  3. Undeploy the application from the test Facebook profile
    1. Remove application
    2. Delete all sessions and cookies
    3. Clear the local database
  4. Redeploy the application
  5. Find another ******** problem!
  6. Repeat

There has to be an easier way. I am going to look at some DNS magic so I can develop on my local machine and point Facebook to it. Problem with that, of course, is you need to reconfigure the application so the client can see it on a public server. Or run your dev box as public a server.

Posted in Development, Facebook, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, Testing | No Comments »