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Recipes finished

Posted by Marty Haught on Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Andy and I finished the two recipes, db:dataset and Selenium integration, for the Advanced Rails Recipes book soon to come out from the Pragmatic Programmers. The process was easier than I was anticipating though the final tweaking of the recipe text went through many revisions.

The db:dataset recipe turned out to be pretty straightforward. I spent several hours carefully reviewing all the code and whittled down some extraneous parts. Creating a good example application that demonstrated the recipe took a bit more time than I had anticipated but given this was my first time doing a recipe I shouldn’t really be surprised. The best part was after all my planning was how easily the writing flowed for the recipe. Now plenty of word smithing and simplifying parts occurred but I expected as much.

The Selenium recipe took considerably more work. The first part was focusing on what the essence of the recipe would cover. Selenium could easy span three recipes so we had to be careful on recipe creep. :) Andy Kappen also reviewed the code and decided to abandon our custom Selenium integration for the Selenium on Rails plugin. This was a good move for the recipe as it provides ease of use for anyone reading the book. We still use our custom integration as it provides several key benefits that the plugin doesn’t but that’s probably for another post. Andy also took the lead role on writing this recipe as I had done on the db:dataset recipe. I did clarify the structure of the recipe and how we’d demonstrate the use of Selenium. We also decided to include two other co-workers, Chris Bernard and Greg Hansen, on the recipe. Greg did a fine job of creating the sample application with pages to test and the functional and integration tests. Chris worked on the Selenium acceptance test. Thankfully we got all four of us rockin’ on the recipe and made the deadline though it went down to the wire.

Thanks guys, I’m proud of the recipe write-ups. Hopefully Chad and Mike will like them and we’ll all get to read them in the upcoming book.

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