I recently found myself searching Stackoverflow and Google for various techniques for automatically testing Rails migrations. I was surprised not to have found too much information though. While testing a migration is fairly straightforward (migrations are classes and you can easily invoke corresponding methods); the challenge can be setting models up properly.

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Recently, a buddy of mine pointed me to an interesting tweet:

New tool converts your Apple #iOS apps to #HTML5 http://dld.bz/cejxz #appdev

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MongoDB supports a rich query language; in fact, its support of dynamic queries is one of its more distinguishing features compared to other datastores in the NoSQL world.

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Search is no longer an optional feature: it’s expected of most any application that consumes, produces, or stores data. And not everyone wants to be a search technology specialist, especially given the range of sophisticated algorithms underlying today’s complex searches (i.e. SQL queries are no longer sufficient!). Knowing about existing, open source search platforms could save you a lot of time and money and allow you to spend your time fine-tuning your software’s main functionality.

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We recently implemented a new feature that required two interesting aspects: storing a file in MongoDB using GridFS (think traditional Blob) and then pushing that file down to a browser.

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Every now and again, I find myself struggling to remember how to execute a single test in Rails. While I have Guard running the entire test suite anytime a change is detected, there are times when I want to focus solely on one test. Accordingly, Flavio Castelli has a great blog entry detailing the manifold ways one can execute a single test using Rake and/or Ruby.

The good folks over at IBM developerWorks have recently published season 5 of the Java technical podcast series. This season
focuses on the technologies, companies, and people influencing cloud computing.

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I recently decided to ditch plain old JavaScript in a Sinatra based application in favor of CoffeeScript. The existing JavaScript wasn’t terribly complex; however, I was looking at having to add some AJAX based long polling and I couldn’t bring myself to do it in JavaScript.

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There’s no shortage of mobile growth statistics, but here’s a few specific ones paint an overall picture of mobility:

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Are you pumped that you just published an app? Yep, me too. But guess what? Once you’ve built, tested, and deployed a mobile app, you’ll find yourself concerned with two factors:

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Over the past decade of finding myself staring at innumerable Ant build files containing a JUnit task, I’ve come to realize a subtle, yet powerful flag, that when not set properly, almost always leads to random and confusing test catastrophes. The JUnit task supports a number of attributes, but the most important is the fork one. This flag controls whether or not the tests being run are invoked within the same JVM instance of Ant itself or within a new one.

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Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking at MoDevTablet where I gave a presentation entitled “Mobile Web Realities” and the good folks who put on the conference recorded it.

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I recently spent time evaluating various mobile browsers’ HTML5 compatibility in an effort to understand the state of the mobile web. Along the way, I discovered that the good folks at Facebook, who happen to have quite a lot of experience with HTML5 and mobility put together a handy website called Ringmark.

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While starting out with MongoDB is super easy, there are few things you should keep in mind as you move from a development environment into a production one. No one wants to get paged at 3am because a customer can’t complete an order on your awesome e-commerce site because your database isn’t responding fast enough or worse, is down.

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In the early days of the desktop computing, software delivery was a matter of going to a store and buying a box. Subsequently, you then went home and manually inserted install disks into a computer. It was, in retrospect, a real pain in the neck. Accordingly, for most people, the software that was loaded on the PC they bought was basically what they only used for the life of the machine. Adding new software to your home PC was an event.

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