From: "David A. Black" Date: 2008-09-11T09:04:00+09:00 Subject: Re: unit testing advice Hi -- On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, David Chelimsky wrote: > On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 6:24 PM, David A. Black wrote: >> Hi -- >> >> On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, David Chelimsky wrote: >> >>> On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 7:20 AM, David A. Black wrote: >>> >>>> The model generation just gives you a file with an empty class definition >>>> for >>>> your tests, and I think something similar happens with RSpec. (Just to >>>> clarify: I'm talking about model generation, not scaffold generation, >>>> which does give you all sorts of tests and which I dislike strongly >>>> and consider manifestly counter-productive.) >>> >>> Hi David - I'm curious to know more about why you find this >>> counter-productive, if you wouldn't mind sharing. >> >> Sorry -- I didn't spot this among the unread for some reason. >> >> I don't want to go into depth since we're not in a Rails forum, but in >> brief, it's my experience that the scaffolding neither provides a good >> starting point for a production application (which I don't believe it >> was ever intended to), nor serves as a good learning tool (which I >> believe it is supposed to be). It's a one-trick pony, and there's much >> too much of a history of people getting confused or stymied because >> they assume that what the scaffolding does is somehow a "default" or >> authoritative application skeleton. > > Hey David, > > Thanks for the response. And here's my late response to yours for much > the same reason... > > I understood your previous comment to mean you found the code examples > generated by rspec to be counter productive, but now I'm sensing its > actually the scaffolding. Yes, I meant the scaffolding. > Forgetting about rspec or rails, my take is that generated code is > just like your own code as far as the ruby runtime is concerned, and > that *if* you are using generated code and maintaining it, that it > should be accompanied by a robust set of generated tests. > > Agree? Disagree? It's an interesting question. I'm trying to puzzle through whether there might ever be a case where you'd be generating code but generating the tests for it was for some reason prohibitively more difficult. I think that if not then it makes sense to generate tests. Or do the tests sometimes themselves involve code generation? (Maybe just dynamic code generation.) David -- Rails training from David A. Black and Ruby Power and Light: Intro to Ruby on Rails January 12-15 Fort Lauderdale, FL Advancing with Rails January 19-22 Fort Lauderdale, FL * * Co-taught with Patrick Ewing! See http://www.rubypal.com for details and updates!