A non cohesive world
Buenas,
Cuando estoy frustado, a veces me cago en todo en ingles, aqui va una pequenya frustacion de esta manyana.
Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, there was a great tool to develop software. That tool, became obsolete, and new ones started taking over. The development of these new tools was so fast, that other tools, could not keep up with the changes. Leading to frankenstein like software, using the better tools when possible and the old ones when left with no other choice.
I have a dream, where all tools will talk to each other perfectly, but that dream is far from realistic. The only solution that I can imagine, is a tool that englobes all the other smaller tools, and thus can interact with all of them smoothly.
An example of this non cohesiveness is apparent in rails, rSpec, fixture_replacement and backgrounDRB. A great combination of tools, that advance at different speeds, and have not yet reached harmony.
As we know, Rails is awesome, rSpec and BDD are the evolution of jUnit and TDD, fixture_replacement isolates the data needed for each case, and backgrounDRB helps to avoid the limitations of HTTP's request/response cycle. Unfortunately backgrounDRB does not yet support the advantages of rSpec Stories which exercise the whole code and thus has to maintain a state of the test database that will get modified along the story and checked for the correct records. Instead we are limited to the rails way of using fixture files, which get loaded and erased with each unit test, breaking the chain of events that lead to the correct testing of a whole feature. Pity, but undoubtedly something we will fix as developers continue to use rails and BDD.
Until then, I will fall back to fixtures files and unit testing, might as well get me a PHP 5 book whilst I'm at it :)
