Reblog

This week’s highlights

Greetings! Another week I didn’t have a lot of time to read, listen or watch. Nevertheless I’ve got some good link for you. The reading queue is now so long I’m thinking to hard reset and start from a clean inbox zero. Happy weekend.

Presenter First Ruby Example | atomicobject.com… Once again the Presenter pattern. The example and accompanying documentation are well done this time although the observer pattern and dependency injection make the example less readable. The Model View Presenter extracts all the presentation flow from the view and since the presentation logic is business logic everything can be tested easily without mocking the UI. The tests are basically from the presenter down but no view (which is just a thin wrapper around the UI api). MVP looks good for tricky UI, where the cost of instantiating and using the UI for the tests is too high. I don’t think it’s the case for erb pages in Rails though because those are really easy to test.

acts_as_conference 2009 tatft-the-laymans-guide-bryan-liles… Here’s another enjoyable talk full of humor and good advices. I can’t say the content was completely new for me. But I updated my tool box with a couple of promising apps. Integrity instead of Cruisecontrol.rb and Culerity that combines Cucumber and Celerity. I’m curious to know if finally we have something robust to use for end to end head-less testing. I’m also interested in trying Vim for development after I saw Bryan’s blog is full of good suggestions. Last: Bryan uses a kind f pomodoro technique with 15 minutes time slots. Good to know someone got to the same conclusion that is better to break often.

Corey Haines acts_as_conference 2009… Corey is a great speaker. With passion. He condensed in this talk a very simple thing: the fear to apply a practice when the pressure comes in and the reasons of that fear. Simple: it’s not enough to spike on TDD and then apply it in all situations. If you don’t master the practice enough chances are you’ll drop TDD close to a deadline because “it’s slow”. TDD isn’t slow, it requires practice like everything else but for some reason in our software industry we don’t consider practicing a practice. Moreover TDD isn’t easy at all and require systematic effort. Only after you practiced enough to “breath” the technique you’re ready to apply it at the same speed of every other tool. Great lighting talk.

Beginning iPhone Development authors Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche… I’m glad sometimes I discover a little gem hidden under a misleading title. So instead of iPhone for beginners I found an Objective-C introduction for developers that I really liked. Mark and LaMarche explains here what is an outlet, how Cocoa classes are serialized into a Nib file and why, the power of a Nil object that can reply to messages, how delegates work plus what you should expect as a C or Java developer approaching iPhone development.