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If you are a Rails-developer, and you don’t know about Heroku, now would definitely be a good time. Heroku is a platform for hosting web-based Ruby applications in “the cloud”, in this case Amazon EC2, making you able to scale your application in an effortless and cost-effective manner without worrying about the hardware behind. Heroku differs from competition by offering by far the fastest and easiest way to deploy your Rails-application. You simply create your application from Heroku’s web interface or using their API, and then push your git-repository to Heroku’s git-server. Heroku takes care of the rest, and you can get back to coding.

I use Heroku for My Big Secret Project, and I am quite happy with not just the ease of deployment it offers, but in fact also with the choices and the constraints that the platform imposes on me. I like writing git push heroku and see my code live immediately. This is of course not that different from Capistrano, once that has been setup with the right recipes and the server has been setup to corporate and serve our web application properly. But that can also take some time, especially on a brand new server.

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When I recently started development of a new, big Rails project, I spend some time researching and considering the many different testing frameworks that are available in the Ruby community today. I have grown very satisfied with the fail/pass rhythm of test-driven development (TDD) – write a test that fails, then write just enough code to make it pass. I also like RSpec a lot, so some would say that I am fact doing behaviour-driven development (BDD) – to me, the only real difference between TDD and BDD is the syntax, and I tend to find RSpec’s examples slightly more readable TestUnit’s tests. TDD gives me a small gratification – a sense of accomplishment, albeit on a small scale – every time a test passes in my autospec terminal.

Howver, TDD’s basic rule of always writing a failing test before writing any new code, doesn’t always leave me feeling very productive. For this reason I have mostly abandoned testing views in isolation (as made possible by RSpec’s view tests), as well as testing Rails helpers with the exception of complicated helper methods with some business logic in them. I still tests views by, behold, viewing them in the browser, and I haven’t been swept away by Cucumber, Webrat, Selenium and their fellow high-level test frameworks yet – but I am open.

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It has been a while since I had a good technical post on this blog, and this is will not be one either. Instead, just a few brief words on a very successful event for geeks in Copenhagen that took place last Thursday. Sponsored by Microsoft and co-presented by the Danish development community, Community Day 2009 Copenhagen delivered what it had promised: A day with free beer and food, interesting presentations and lots of networking across the usual technical boundaries. While the event, previously exclusively with a focus on Microsoft technology, was dominated by seasoned .NET developers, we, the Ruby crowd, was well represented as was the PHP programmers.

Daniel Mellgaard Frost, Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Denmark, had put together a diverse program where only two talks was devoted entirely to Microsoft technologies (Silverlight and LINQ), but six out of eight talks was about web development in some form. I did a talk on ActiveRecord, the O/RM of Ruby on Rails, and according to the many happy comment I got afterwards, it went pretty well.

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