Meet phrack, my completely unimplemented rack based web framework (I’m hoping to have a basic implementation done by the end of the week). It is entirely a pet project to learn more about the implementation of a web framework, to better understand the application stack while not getting too attached to any one implementation (Merb and Ruby being the heavy-weights in my day-to-day right now). I’d like to thank Pratik Naik for his great articles on the subject (Ruby On Rack #1, Ruby On Rack #2). If you want to start digging in and working with Rack they are a great place to start.
Two other items. I’ve pushed some updates to my fork of the Screw.Unit Server javascript testing framework. You can grab the code here. My changes include the ability to pass spec names to your before/after blocks for debugging purposes (this combined with Blackbirds profile debugger can give you awesome performance metrics on your javascript code), and top-level describe blocks now collapse if all of its contained specs pass (except when running a focused spec, for obvious reasons). It’s a good first pass, but I’m going to shift around some code to improve performance when I get a chance. The other item is that I’m officially starting to work on my book (finally), tentatively titled “Test-Driven Development with Javascript”. This is something that I feel very strongly in as a development practice, and I think is an area that could use some guides to help developers see that a) yes, you can test your javascript and b) that there are several options for doing so. I’ll be putting updates about the status of the book here as I make progress. Also, interested parties may be tapped for helping review my early drafts to make it as useful as it possibly can be.
