Today is a special day, because Hacker Says - the micro-site created with the help of my friend Andri Möll - got released! Wohoo!
It has interesting, funny and important quotes which apply to software development, programming and life in general. And that all is available for viewing in three different themes!
Here’s a preview of Hacker Says using Sepia theme:
Backend has been written in Ruby using Sinatra, Sass and Haml. Front-end uses JavaScript with HTML5 pushState. It is deployed to Heroku.
Have fun and put it on some large screen at your office for that extra daily entertainment!
Update #2 (2012.05.24)
Today we released an improved version of Hacker Says. We took all the feedback into account. Let us know what you think of it!
Update
These are statistics for the first two days:
Not bad at all. We got the feedback from the users to prepare for another launch with improvements. This is how MVP should be done!
Ruby is a great programming language, but unfortunately it does have some problems when using on Windows. One of it’s biggest drawbacks is it’s slowness when loading files. This is also slower than it ought to be on Unix platforms, but not as slow as on Windows. Thankfully there is some work going on to make it faster in future versions. It’s already possible to make it faster yourself!
Benchmarks
I will conduct two types of benchmarks. Firstly i’m gonna create an empty Rails 3 project and see how much time would it boot up. Secondly there is a project called measurements which allows to perform some operations on your Ruby and one of these are benchmarks for loading files. Let’s see how it goes for Ruby 1.9.2, 1.9.3 from RubyInstaller and patched 1.9.3.
These benchmarks show that Ruby 1.9.2 is really slow and patched 1.9.3 got about 50% performance boost compared to regular 1.9.3. That’s something to be happy about! I’m using average laptop PC which means that if you have a more decent hardware then the results might be very different from me.
Prerequisites
The following components are needed to speedup your Ruby:
If you’d like to skip all that hassle of building all the things yourself then you can download already prebuilt patched Ruby versions too! Read the “Faster Way” part about that below.
Get Fenix
Fenix is a Ruby extension written by Luis Lavena. Luis is a really helpful and great guy, at least when it comes to Ruby on Windows. He is part of the Ruby core team, is the main man behind RubyInstaller and has created many nice libraries like sqlite3-ruby, rake-compiler and many others.
Back to Fenix. It changes File.expand_path method to be faster. All the 50% speedup seen from the benchmarks were coming from this change since this method is called more than once when loading files. Pretty impressive or rather sad bottleneck in Ruby. Get the Fenix extension, compile and benchmark it:
Not bad benchmark results.
Patching & Compiling Ruby
Unfortunately only File.expand_path method is faster when using this extension, but there’s Ruby’s require and load methods, which also execute expand_path, but they will do so by using internal C expand_path function instead. Solution for that problem is to patch Ruby code to use Fenix.expand_path internally also! First step would be to clone Ruby itself (make sure that line endings are not converted by Git):
`git status` shows us that file.c and load.c files are modified. It’s time to start compiling Ruby itself. Best way to do that would be to use RubyInstaller itself (how ironic, we’re using Ruby to build Ruby). Make sure to disable ANSICON too since it is known to cause problems during the compilation process:
This takes some time and if the process raises any errors, just try again. If there’s still errors don’t hesitate to write to RubyInstaller mailing list or contact Luis directly. He’s very helpful, as i already stated above.
After the process is done “install” new Ruby with Fenix and make sure that it’s used by setting environment variables too:
Make sure that the PATH and RUBYOPT environment variables are set permanently. And try it out if it’s faster for you too!
Faster Way
In case you don’t want to spend your time cloning, compiling and testing then there is a faster way to boost your Ruby. There exists a project called The Code Shop, which tries to solve the Ruby performance problem on Windows. It makes different builds available to download, each experimenting with different set of patches. I can recommend tcs-ruby193_require_winio_fenix-20111113 because it seems to be the fastest. Here are some benchmark results:
Fenix is already precompiled into these builds. You still need to compile and install Fenix and set PATH and RUBYOPT environments as described above.
In Conclusion
The main point of this post is that things aren’t always as rosy as they could be, but it’s possible to make them better. It is really valuable that you give feedback to projects like The Code Shop (e.g. what are your benchmark results) so the final result could get better in the future without any additional hassle for everyone. I hope that you can now start your engines much faster!
I mentioned page objects in the post about WatirSplash 2. In this post i’m gonna explain what these things exactly are and how to use them.
What Is A Page?
When it comes to automated testing then the page is really nothing else than the page user sees when visiting the website. Any meaningful page consists of different components some of which just show information (e.g. text) others allow interaction (e.g. text fields and buttons). Different pages might also have some shared content like header, search field and footer. One important thing about components is that the result of some interactions is another page.
Let me bring you a concrete example. Let’s look at the Bing’s main page (enough of Google in all examples, alright). You can think of the possible sections (Web, Images, Videos, News and More) as a header. There is also the search field and button. Search button is special since clicking on it changes the current page to results page. Makes sense? Let’s see how to convert that information into WatirSplash Page Objects.
Point Of Having Page Objects
The point of having Page Objects is to have better structured code and keep it DRY in your tests too. This all makes your tests easier to maintain. If you’re a software developer then you care about these things when it comes to production code. Why not to use these good practices in tests also? Page Objects make it all possible. Having Page Objects means that it should be easier to change your tests if the application under test (AUT) changes since you need only one place (ideally) to change. Page Objects also make it very clear where to find existing and put the new code.
Let’s Get Rockin’ With Pages And Objects
Let’s get more concrete. I assume that you have created a WatirSplash 2 project already. If not then follow the instructions in the post about WatirSplash 2 or read everything you need to know straight from the README. Let’s create the Main page first:
This command created us the Main page object and a test for it. The generated file looks like this:
And the test itself is nothing fancy yet:
Let’s add something meaningful to our Main page object like search field and button:
You can use all the familiar Watir methods directly in your Page objects! For the sake of clarity let’s also add Header functionality. To do that we’d just use Ruby’s mixin functionality - the Header module:
And make sure to include it into your page object:
We can now update our main_spec to actually test something:
I made two tests - one for the header and another for the search functionality. Since header should be on every page, i could have taken advantage of the RSpec’s Shared Examples feature, but for the sake of this post’s clarity i didn’t.
The second test is a failing test since there’s no way that Watir’s Button#click will return us a results page object. But hey, i’ve just done a little TDD here! Let’s make it work like we want it to work:
I’ve used the WatirSplash::Page::Base#modify method which takes some object as it’s first argument (here button) and a Hash as a second argument. Hash consists of method name as a key and value as Proc object. In this particular case the code above overrides this particular button’s #click method with my #click, which returns Results page object due to the usage of #redirect_to method. Since #click is already existing method on that button, then it will call the original method (e.g. performs the actual clicking) before calling the defined block. The #modify method does all that by using Ruby’s meta-programming. You can always look at the source itself if you’re more interested in the nitty-gritty details.
Let’s create ourselves a Results page object with the results method. This time, let’s be even cooler and generate more code than we did with the Main page object:
This generated us the Results class with the results method:
Let’s add the #count and #[] methods to our #results object by using #modify again so we could chain method invocations naturally as i’ve written in the search functionality test:
I’m invoking the #results method again to get the Watir::Ul element to execute regular Watir methods on it - in these cases #li and #lis. This neat trick hides the implementation details from the tests and makes the tests even more natural to read.
In Conclusion
That’s it - we have created a few tests using Page Objects functionality in WatirSplash 2! Using Page Objects makes your tests (hopefully) more readable and easier to maintain. I like my implementation when compared to others because it makes your page objects to look really succinct and doesn’t add any additional complex API to learn - you can use already learnt Watir methods as you did before. And the code written to support creating and using these Page Objects is also quite clever and short. I love it! I hope you will too.
There is a term called DLL Hell which in my opinion exists also in the Ruby community with the different name - Gem Hell. This potential problem exists when dependencies for your project and/or libraries are not managed properly.
I’ve written in the post WatirSplash 2 about loading all the dependencies with the help of the Bundler, which helps to organize the dependencies in a sanely way and tries to eliminate the Gem Hell problem. In this post i’m gonna give a more detailed overview of how the things were before and how they are now in the WatirSplash framework.
Story Behind WatirSplash’ Dependencies
Since WatirSplash is a framework which supports using different frameworks for browser automation (Watir, Watir-WebDriver and FireWatir) then there needs to be some kind of a mechanism for defining the install and runtime dependencies. Install dependencies are easy to specify since they can be put right into the .gemspec file of the WatirSplash gem and RubyGems does all the heavylifting:
It gets trickier when it comes to specifying the runtime dependencies. “Why runtime dependencies at all?” - you might ask. The answer to this question is fairly simple - because the framework used for automating the browser is chosen during runtime and it’s not possible to put all these gems into installation dependencies due to the problem of Watir (for controlling the IE browser) not installing successfully on Linux or OS X operating systems for obvious reasons. There are also other OS-specific gems. Also, it’s not possible (at least not in my knowledge of) to specify platform specific dependencies right into the .gemspec file itself.
The Old Way
The runtime dependencies in WatirSplash 1 were loaded with the help of the RubyGems itself. When the desired framework was specified then WatirSplash loaded the appropriate file, which executed the code similar to this for Watir:
It meant that the user of WatirSplash needed to have the Watir version 2.0.1 installed and if he didn’t then the installation instructions were provided.
This solution seems to solve the problem of specifying runtime dependencies at first. There are still some problems with this approach. First of all, if Watir has a dependency for some other gem without any specific or with too loose version then it is possible that some newer version of that gem breaks the usage of WatirSplash and i, as a maintainer of the WatirSplash gem, have to release a new version of the WatirSplash gem by specifying the exact version of that gem as a runtime dependency. Second problem is that if a newer version of Watir (or any other among the runtime dependency gems) were released then it was not possible for the user of WatirSplash to try if it was working with the current version of WatirSplash (which was pretty often the case) without modifying the code of WatirSplash itself or waiting for the new release made by me with updated runtime dependencies. These are the two main and quite big problems with this approach.
The New Way
These problems were solved by introducing the usage of Bundler. Bundler allows to specify runtime dependencies exactly like with RubyGems, but it has a difference of locking down the dependencies versions. This means that user A and user B are always using the same versions of all the runtime dependencies no matter what other versions they have installed on their system.
By using WatirSplash 2, you will get the following Gemfile into your specs directory, when running new project generator, for specifying all the needed dependencies:
After executing `bundle install` do not forget to add Gemfile.lock also into your VCS - this is the only way to guarantee that everyone who is running the tests are using the exact same versions of the dependencies.
This solution allows each user of the WatirSplash to specify their own dependency versions without any need to wait for the new release of the WatirSplash itself. In other words - this solution solves both of the problems existent in the previous RubyGems solution.
Conclusion
Bundler tries to make the Gem Hell problem disappear and is doing a pretty good job there, but if there are gems which depend on some external native library, which needs compilation then there is still the danger of having a wrong version of that dependency causing compilation errors. Probability of seeing that problem is quite low compared to the problems which Bundler solves. All in all Bundler is a really great tool and thanks to that WatirSplash has gotten even better.
WatirSplash 2 has been released already some time ago, but i haven’t covered the nice things which came with it. This situation will be improved with the following posts.
New Features
The biggest changes in WatirSplash 2 compared to version 1.x are:
Removed cumbersome and usually not needed “ui-test-common” functionality.
Made WatirSplash more transparent making it easier to follow what, when and how it does the things it does and giving better control over it.
Removed Features
It is quite easy to understand from the “New Features” list that projects generated with WatirSplash 1.x won’t work out of the box with WatirSplash 2. I had to break backwards compatibility due to the decisions made in the past which were in my way improving the framework to make it just a lot better.
I’ve paid attention to the users of WatirSplash and noticed what they didn’t like or what they have been wanting to do differently. This has caused me to use .rspec file to configure RSpec all the way instead of doing it programmatically from the WatirSplash itself. This gives a better control for tuning the usage of RSpec when needed.
Even browser window won’t be opened and maximized automatically anymore - you can still do it with the help of RSpec.configure block.
All these little details should make the experience of using WatirSplash even better!
Getting Started
Starting to use WatirSplash is as easy as splashin’ in the water. First you have to install the gem itself ofcourse:
After doing that you’d need to generate a default project structure. It can be done by using the “new” generator:
Being inside of the newly created project directory, install all the required dependencies aswell:
After having that done, generate the very first Page Object with the “page” generator. For example:
There you have it. Modify the newly generated files and start specc’ing. There will be a more thorough posts about the main new features including how to use Page Objects in the future - stay tuned. Feel free to read more information about WatirSplash from it’s repository at GitHub.
Jarmo Pertman is an enthusiastic developer using the Ruby programming language. He is one of the core developers of the popular automated testing framework Watir. He is also responsible for some other libraries like WatirSplash, RAutomation, Win32::Screenshot and require_all. IT Really Matters is his personal blog where he tries to write about stuff that really matter in IT.
3 weeks ago
