Monthly Archives: September 2011

Adding A ‘has_image?’ Matcher To Capybara

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Derick Bailey

I’m rather shocked that Capybara doesn’t have a ‘has_image?’ matcher built in to it. But after search around google for a while, the only thing I found was a bunch of StackOverflow answers that all say to use ‘has_xpath?’ to … Continue reading →

Posted in Capybara, Rails, RSpec, Test Automation | 2 Comments

SEO And Accessibility With HTML5 PushState, Part 2: Progressive Enhancement With Backbone.js

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Derick Bailey

In my previous post, I introduced the idea of HTML5′s PushState – a way to manage a browser’s URL without making a round trip to the server to retrieve the information at that URL. In this post, I’ll be taking … Continue reading →

Posted in Backbone, Javascript, User Experience | 9 Comments

SEO And Accessibility With HTML5 PushState, Part 1: Introducing PushState

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Derick Bailey

With the increasing popularity of JavaScript frameworks and highly functional, stateful javascript applications through frameworks such as Backbone.js, SproutCore, KnockOut.js, etc, more and more developers are starting to ask questions about search engine optimization (SEO) and accessibility. There are more … Continue reading →

Posted in Accessibility, Backbone, Javascript, SEO, User Experience | 4 Comments

Dependency Injection Is NOT The Same As The Dependency Inversion Principle

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Derick Bailey

A long time ago, when I first started blogging with LosTechies, I wrote up a few posts on Dependency Inversion and Dependency Injection, and how I finally started to understand what Dependency Injection was all about. At the time, I thought … Continue reading →

Posted in C#, Principles and Patterns, Ruby | 8 Comments

A Visual History Of The Usefulness Of Ruby On Rails

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Derick Bailey

Everyone seems to know about the benefit of MVC frameworks in web development these days. It’s no secret that there is a lot of power in this stuff, and it’s largely due to the popularity of Ruby on Rails that … Continue reading →

Posted in Rails | 7 Comments

Zombies! RUN! (Managing Page Transitions In Backbone Apps)

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Derick Bailey

One of the common issues or questions I see for Backbone.js goes something like this: “Whenever I hit the same route more than once, I end up getting seeing this call being made multiple times. It seems to accumulate another … Continue reading →

Posted in Backbone, Javascript, Model-View-Controller | 34 Comments

Resources For, And How I Learned Backbone.js

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Derick Bailey

I received an email from Mark Muskardin, today, asking me some questions centered around how I ramped up and learned backbone, and looking for some good resources, too. I’ve had similar questions a number of times in recent weeks, so … Continue reading →

Posted in Backbone, Education, Javascript, Test Automation, Unit Testing | 7 Comments

Test-Driving Backbone Views With JQuery Templates, The Jasmine Gem, and Jasmine-JQuery

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Derick Bailey

In my current production rails app, I use Cucumber to test my backbone code as an integration test – to make sure that the entire system is playing nice. Over the weekend, I decided to dive a little deeper into my … Continue reading →

Posted in Backbone, JQuery, Model-View-Controller, Ruby, Unit Testing | 8 Comments

Custom Jasmine Matchers For Clarity In Testing Backbone.js Models

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Derick Bailey

I’ve been writing some Jasmine specs for a sample Backbone.js application that I’m building. The application is a simple image gallery, and one of the features is the ability to navigate to through the image list with ‘next’ and ‘previous’ … Continue reading →

Posted in Backbone, Behavior Driven Development, Javascript, Testing | Leave a comment