Comments on: learns_to build Academic Archive::Part 2:Setting up a New Rails App and a First Iteration on the Paper Model, Featuring our First Tests

By: James Mead

James Mead — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:54:10 +0000

Cool. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:40:24 +0000

James, I’ve actually been looking at Mocha at work, but haven’t yet made the plunge. On this current project, my co-developer set up a great little system for stubbing out object methods that’s just been so helpful and it’s definitely given me the mock bug. When you get into any kind of a complex situation, it’s just so nice to isolate an area of functionality for testing.
Now, with your recommendation I’ll definitely have to give Mocha a shot. Maybe I’ll even figure out a way to work it in to the development on Academic Archive. . .

By: James Mead

James Mead — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 01:56:34 +0000

I wholeheartedly agree with your suggestion "Don't test something that's part of the framework or a third-party library". This is particularly true of unit tests, but regularly overlooked. You might be interested in Mocha which we use at Reevoo so we can do things like test our model code without testing ActiveRecord code.

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:43:48 +0000

Papers totally have more attributes. . .in the long run. All the ones you mentioned are strong candidates and the papers table is exactly where we’ll store them when we add them. When I am just starting on something, I always try to make the simplest version of it that can possibly work. Otherwise, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed by all the things there are to do and end up confused and dispirited.
Remember all of these ideas as you’re having are great and you should totally hang on to them for when it’s time. Or, I guess, we can just look back here to these posts! One of the advantages of doing this kind of thing in public. . .

By: Jem

Jem — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 17:53:04 +0000

Another handy tutorial entry!
Do “Papers” have any other attributes? Perhaps creative commons licenses or original date of composition (which might be relevant for copyright/precedence claims) or character-set/language? What about abstracts and summaries and other metadata, do they go into a different table?