Watchr is a continuous-testing tool by Martin Aumont in the vein of Autotest (part of the ZenTest package).

At its heart, Watchr basically watches any (or all!) of your project’s files, then executes arbitrary Ruby code of your choice when things change.  Watchr configuration takes such a form:

watch(‘pattern’) { |match_data_object| command_to_run }

For example, to produce Autotest-like functionality, you’d just specify Watchr to run the tests whenever a test or some library code changes, like this (taken from Martin’s blog post):

watch(‘test/test_.*\.rb’) { |md| system “ruby #{md[0]}”}
watch(‘lib/(.*)\.rb’) { |md| system “ruby test/test_#{md[1]}.rb”}

…but Watchr can be used for much more than just testing. Read More

Create Your Own Programming Language is a interesting new information product and community by Marc-André Cournoyer (of Thin fame) that promises to teach you how to create a simple programming language. The official site is well worth checking out, even if you don’t want to buy it, as it’s a great example of how to sell a product like this. Create Your Own Programming Language costs $39.99 and has a two month money back guarantee.

What You Get – 2 Different Approaches

The package includes a 53 page PDF (only 44 pages in the earlier copy I received), a pile of source code (for two different types of bootstrapped languages), and a screencast, along with access to a community of other users. Read More

Evan Light has recently pushed his Coulda project to Github – it’s a test framework based on Test::Unit, inspired by Cucumber, Shoulda and Thor.

Coulda works like Cucumber in that it’s a Domain Specific Language for capturing the behaviour expected by your code, as part of the Behavior Driven Develoment approach (BDD). Others have noted it’s a little like the RSpec story runner.

Where Coulda differs is that instead of using Gherkin to convert your statements about the behavior to code using regular expressions, it uses standard method calls. This is less of a cognitive leap for the developer… Read More

I have been contemplating the use of document-stores in my Ruby apps for a few months (you might remember my MongoMapper post from back in June), and I’ve been following developments in the No-SQL movement. George Palmer’s presentation at Rails Underground on his couch_foo gem inspired me to explore the possibilities further, and I’ve recently started work on incorporating CouchDB into some projects that I’m working on.

What is a “document store?”

Couch is one of several available document oriented databases (the other main contender being MongoDB, for which there’s a good comparison on the Mongo website). Document stores go some way to bridging the gap between traditional functionality-rich relational databases (like MySQL, Postgres) and fast, highly scalable key/value stores (such as Toyko Cabinet). Read More