Tonight we had the March meeting of the Northern VA Ruby Users Group. First up was Douglas Sellers who talked about Selenium and Selenium on Rails. After a short break, I spoke about RESTful Rails (focusing on CRUD, REST and ActiveResource).
Doug provided us with an excellent overview of Selenium core and went in to how to install and configure it (hint: it’s as simple as downloading and unzipping it into your public web root directory). He then went into the steps involved in manually creating tests and test suites and how it gets tedious very quickly (as you’re writing HTML tables). To make the development tester’s job much easier he walked through the same test using Selenium on Rails which allows you to use Ruby to generate your tests. Doug’s slides are available here. I ended up rushing through my slides and didn’t enunciate well so the listener experience was pretty bad, I’m sure. I need to relax when presenting and slow down. Still, I think that the content stands on its own and many folks seemed interested in my sample application for managing users groups. You can download the PDF-ized slides here and once I get the subversion repository setup, you’ll be able to view and checkout the source code here. Also, here are the two scripts I followed for the demo: REST and ActiveResource.