I felt compelled to post this because this book is just great & I wanted to share it with anyone who is interested. If you are just getting into behavior driven development (BDD), RSpec or cucumber then I have a book to recommend to you! Having heard nothing but good things, I recently purchased “The RSpec Book” by David Chelimsky, Dave Astels, Zach Dennis, Aslak Hellesøy, Bryan Helmkamp, Dan North from Pragmatic Programmers.

It’s a easy read that is packed with great tips on how to approach BDD – as well as detailed info on rspec’s features, and tons of other very useful stuff.

The book is in beta right now (not finished) but you can purchase & get the PDF right now. As updates are made you can re-download the PDF. Once the book is actually finished as paperback will be sent to me. I can’t wait!

Worth mentioning is that I  am just a fan — not affiliated with anyone who makes money from this, nor do I make any money for posting this or my website in general.

I was working with a colleague today who was kind enough to introduce me to autotest for continuous test integration. Change a file in your app & tests are automatically run for you… Nice.

screenshot of my mumble alert (top-right)

One thing that really stood out aesthetically was how status messages were passed to Growl (in OSX) for eye-pleasing popup notifications outside of a terminal window.

Being a ubuntu user, I started looking for a similar solution for linux. It turns out there is a great utility for linux that resembles Growl — it’s called Mumbles. The challenge was getting Mumbles to work with autotest.

After searching google, I found one post that got me started. This is a good post, but I had to fill in a few blanks to get everything to work.

Here’s what I did:

1. Install ZenTest:

sudo gem install ZenTest

1. Install Mumbles
   • grab the latest .deb file or source from the mumbles-project page:

   wget https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=193587&package_id=227998

   • test out mumbles by running:

   mumbles &

   mumbles-send ‘a title’ ‘it works!!’

   • assuming mumbles has been installed correctly, you should see a little notification pop up. I recommend that at this point you add mumbles to your system session so it will start when you login to ubuntu.

   gnome-session-properties

   add -> “mumbles” for name & command -> ok

2. Install ruby-dbus. I could not find a gem, so install manually:
   • grab the latest from https://trac.luon.net/ruby-dbus/

   wget https://trac.luon.net/data/ruby-dbus/releases/ruby-dbus-0.2.1.tar.gz

   • extract the archive to a local directory

   tar -xvf ./ruby-dbus-0.2.1.tar.gz

   • look over the README file — it provides simple instructions:

   ruby setup.rb config

   ruby setup.rb setup

   sudo ruby setup.rb install

   • test this out by requiring dbus via irb:

   irb

   irb(main):001:0> require ‘dbus’

   => true

3. Create a .autotest file in your application root directory (or your home directory to make the settings global) Thanks to CaffinatedCode for this script — they wrote it:

require ‘dbus’def send_message(title, message, icon)
begin
bus = DBus::SessionBus.instance
mumbles_service = bus.service(“org.mumblesproject.Mumbles”)
mumbles = mumbles_service.object(“/org/mumblesproject/Mumbles”)
mumbles.introspect
mumbles_iface = mumbles["org.mumblesproject.Mumbles"]
sig = mumbles_iface.signals["Notify"]
bus.emit(mumbles_service, mumbles, mumbles_iface, sig, title, message, icon)
rescue Exception => e
end
end

Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
begin
output = at.results.last.slice(/(\d+) examples?, (\d+) failures?(, \d+ pending)?/)
if output =~ /.*[1-9] failure.*/ then
send_message(“FAIL”, “#{output}”, “fail.png”)
else
send_message(“PASS”, “#{output}”, “pass.png”)
end
rescue Exception => e
end
end

Now for the fun part. From within your app root, type:

autotest

If everything works out, you should see a few things flash by – I get a error about “Insecure world writable dir” in my home dir. I just ignored that. After that, you should see a test summary in the terminal window, followed by a mumbles popup notificaton. Kick ass!