Until a couple of days, I didn’t know there was something called  Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). I realized and was quite impressed with how BDD can add value in combination with Test Driven Development (TDD). Below are the principles of BDD, copied from its home page.

1. It is all behavior - Business and Technology should refer to the same system in the same way
2. Where is the business value - Any system should have an identified, verifiable value to the business
3. Enough is enough - Up-front analysis, design and planning all have a diminishing return

Theory is good but we understand concepts better with examples. In fact before I read about BDD at its home page I learnt how to do BDD when I read an article on “How I Learned to Love Testing” presentation, on Rails Envy. The presentation (a 30 minute quicktime movie) explains two aspects. The first aspect is why writing test code is important and how you can get to a mode from “I don’t like writing tests” to “I love testing”. The second aspect is on the BDD using the RSpec plugin for Rails. The concept is good and I really see a value, particularly the 1st principle which would help technical people start thinking and speaking in business terms throughout the development of a system. I am yet to try my hands on RSpec but based on the presentation and the links provided in the above article, I am keen on trying it soon on a project.

When it comes to the production environment it is a real test for the application as the users start using the application. It is very important that the performance of the application is something that has to be proactively measured and is a continuous constant effort to get the production environment fine tuned to the need. As far as Rails is concerned there are few insights here and there on the scalability and performance of the application. Stefan Kaes has written a package called Railsbench consisting of some Ruby and shell script code that can do some performance measurement of Rails application. Complementing the plugin is this article by Stefan on “A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails” that talks about some common performance problems. But as mentioned by Stefan in the article some analysis of the performance of the application is necessary to apply the relevant changes to the application.

ActiveMessaging is a plugin for Ruby on Rails to enable messaging between applications. This brings in the ability for Ruby on Rails to integrate with messaging systems like MQ, JMS and so on enabling application integration. ActiveMessaging also features enabling applications with event driven architecture. To get started with ActiveMessaging read the article “Introduction to ActiveMessaging for Rails“.

If you are new to Rails application development then troubleshooting even the common mistakes and errors might be difficult. The Ruby on Rails Wiki has a “TroubleShooting Rails” page that has solutions for common starting trouble problems. Bookmark the page, just in case you are stuck.

If for any reason, not to try ruby on rails is the IDE, particularly if you are a .Net developer and so addicted to the visual studio environment, try Ride-Me. It is an IDE built for the windows environment for building Ruby on Rails applications.

Ruby Quiz is an online weekly programming challenge for Ruby developers. Join the mailing list and get the questions emailed and also the solutions that users post. I think it is a great way to learn Ruby as one not only can participate and test his abilities but also get to know the solutions that others post.

Waitr (pronounced Water) is another browser based functional testing tool like Selenium.  Waitr is written in Ruby and is available as a gem. Waitr is available for Internet Explorer and so obviously for Windows.  Functional test automations can save a lot of time when it comes to testing the system for existing functions rather than doing a manual testing. Now that Waitr is there it complements Selenium on Firefox which covers both the key browsers widely used.

We know the power of Ruby on Rails and what convention over configuration could do. We realized this without any doubt when we built Suggestica and iPolipo. Convention over Configuration is more about built in structure and configuration. All the developers need to do is to use the built in structure and configuration and just focus on the code that will perform the function required by the application. This saves a lot of time in terms of architecture and design and can really help in delivering solutions very quick. With steaming success of Rails and focus on Web 2.0, the industry has started realizing the importance of such framework rather than complex configurations.

Now Grails is another entry in this arena that uses the Groovy language for its framework. Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java Platform with many features that are inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk, making them available to Java developers using a Java-like syntax. As we move on there will be more frameworks like this coming up catering to the languages that are used for web application development. If you want to learn Grails here is the free e-book “Getting Started with Grails” that you can download from InfoQ (needs registration).