ThoughtWorks employee Muness Alrubaie filled in for Neil Ford at OSCON, giving a talk on Testing in the Web Tier.
He's mentioned the standbys like Selenium and Firebug, but he also covered Crosscheck. I'll just quote from their website.
Crosscheck is an open source testing framework for verifying your in-browser javascript. It helps you ensure that your code will run in many different browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, but without needing installations of those browsers. The only thing you need is a Java Virtual Machine.
Apparently it's much faster than trying to run in every browser and catches a lot of the big problems right away.
It's looks like a tool worth trying.
It's a long story, but last night I verbally accepted an offer to work on a very cool project at Cisco. They have an enterprise Rails and Java project that I find very interesting. The technology stack is pretty big, so I may be dipping back into other technologies as well.
It is a full-time position, not a consulting gig, so this will dramatically change my focus, but I'll continue to speak on the No Fluff tour, and other conferences. The people I'll be working with see the benefit to letting me get out of the office and interface with smart people.
I'll post more when I have more time, but for now that's the announcement. :)
I got mail from Fred Medlin today about a Tangler group he started to help extend the NFJS experience.
Come drop in and contribute as well as learn. Make the most of your NFJS experience.
No Fluff Just Stuff Tangler page
In Fred's words:
I've been digging tangler lately and I wondered if others would, too. So, I created a NFJS group because I had a great time, but there didn't seem to be another forum for continuing the experience. I enjoyed the show and especially the meal and break time conversations and was hoping there would be enough people interested in the same. So check it out!
I've been absolutely swamped lately, so thought I'd write a quick post with some updates.
This weekend the No Fluff Just Stuff tour came to town. The Research Triangle Software Symposium was really great. Someone told me "I finally get why you rave about the show so much. Every topic has been great and every speaker is polished and very well spoken. It's awesome!"
Tomorrow morning I'm heading to Portland for OSCON. It's the first time I've attended this conference and it's starting to look like it's going to be a very busy week.
Then Friday I'll head south to another No Fluff tour date in Phoenix. The Desert Southwest Software Symposium. As usual, I'll be on the Agile track.
I attended the first meeting of a local Erlang user's group, erlounge RDU. Nineteen members and counting! I can see that Erlang is going to require a bit of neural rewiring before I can do much with it, but there are some interesting bits in there.
Kevin Smith is the erlounge RDU organizer. You'll find some great tips on his blog, Hypothetical Labs
Work has been very interesting lately on several fronts. I hope to have an announcement shortly about a major shift in my focus and direction.
Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects is up for a reprint. I think this is the fourth printing. I'm planning on updating my bio and some of the tooling appendixes. There's also a Korean translation in the works. That'll be a version in English, German, Japanese, as well as the India subcontinent version.
And the battery in my Mac Book Pro has largely gone south in the last month. I think it may have been the 10.4.10 update, but now the battery seems to run out of juice when the meter says I've got an hour left. And I've gone from over 3 hours of reported battery runtime to only 2 hours... of course, when the last hour can't be used because the laptop goes dead, I'm really only getting one hour. :( This is the first time I've had any battery issues with this laptop, but it looks like a trip to the Apple store is in order.
Oh, and the latest Potter book was great. :)
I saw this today and had to pass it on. Apparently Rails can handle a Slashdotting just fine. Like any other web technology, you can create scalable applications, or not. As long as you make reasonable technology choices, it's up to you and your architecture to scale.
Rails, Slashdotted: no problem
Everyone tells me that Rails is supposed to be slow, but I keep running into examples of how well it scales. I've had a few client engagements recently where I thought Rails would need help to handle the load and it's pleasantly surprised me out of the box.
So if you "know" Rails doesn't scale, do you know this because you tried it out or just heard about it? People mention Twitter, but remember that Twitter had issues at 11,000 hits per second. (Do the math... do you need 11,000 hits per second?) And their issue (a single database behind Rails) has been fixed. (This page has a good summary with links).
I'm just saying, don't discount the performance of Rails until you've tried it out yourself. I'm finding more and more that Rails scales just fine.
