Comments on: Current Status

By: Jason Meridth

Jason Meridth — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:42:36 +0000

@Tobin
I agree on the application building

@Gordon
I’m actually still working on the C# API I’ve mentioned. Like Tobin said, I adhere to a more ReSTful API now in my apps. I still use MonoRail for my applications and ONLY use ASP.NET WebForms to help people who refuse to try MVC.

Unfortunately, there are so many things that you want to change when you go back to .NET and things like FubuMVC and the Castle Stack are making those moves, it still just isn’t the same.

Yeah my list is long, but I’ve already tackled most of it, just trying to find time to blog about it. And the Slicehost Articles already do most of what I’d post. I’m just trying to post about scar tissue stuff.

I’ve always preferred Linux and OSS stuff to MS and .NET, but in San Antonio, .NET conquers and I wasn’t qualified enough to get into the company I’m at now.

I’ll be posting soon and please keep me in check or ask questions so I can relate this to the .NET world.

@Tobin
Wow. 4 years ago? You’re well ahead of the curve I’m on. Side note: Nice job ob NHIA. Good book.

By: Tobin Harris

Tobin Harris — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:54:17 +0000

@Gordon

+1 to that.

I know that after I first used Rails (4 years ago!) and did a .NET project, the things I did differently were (back in 2005):

- Used Castle ActiveRecord (great tool)
- Started using Prototype/Scriptaculous
- Use the Rails folder and file structure (stylesheets, javascripts etc)
- Hacked ASP.NET so most of my requests were GETs, and used POST only for changing things.
- Hacked ASP.NET for strucuture controller/action urls (/customer/edit/1 kind of thing)
- Generated database from the model

I still love Rails today, and it still influences my development style heavily. It caused me to re-think many things. Will be interesting to hear what Jason at the end if it all.

By: Gordon Hartley

Gordon Hartley — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:58:33 +0000

It’d also be nice to find out from you what you’d do differently when/if you go back to a primarily .Net environment – although your list of things to post about looks to be pretty long already!?

By: Tobin Harris

Tobin Harris — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:09:03 +0000

I’m working with Rails right now too, and I’m loving it. (I’m also working with a few .NET projects at the same time, and loving those too).

IMHO RoR has got code-sharing down to a T. I often feel like I’m assembling applications, not writing them.

I look forward to trying Shoulda. And I look foward to what IronRuby will bring to .NET.

By: Jason Meridth

Jason Meridth — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:41:17 +0000

I’ve been doing the basic functional testing of my controllers, not using any other tools but shoulda and mocha (for mocking). I’ll definitely check out webrat. Thanks for the heads-up.

I’m doing Rails full-time so I’m hoping to educate while I learn. Best way to learn is to teach/share, right? :)

By: Sean Scally

Sean Scally — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:29:25 +0000

I’ve been working with some of these same things in my free time ( I’m a fulltime c# guy at work ) and it’s nice to see other people reaching some similar conclusions.

test/unit seemed too guttural, rspec seemed too much, shoulda sits in that sweet spot in between.

Are you doing any integration testing in Rails? I’ve been investigating using shoulda with webrat for outside-in integration first testing to drive out stories and then using TDD for controllers and models further in. There’s a lot of tools out there in the ruby/rails world for this stuff but not a lot of examples or blogs.