Tonight there was a ChiSC meetup and then I had some family stuff to tend to so this is going to be a short post.

This morning I got clearance to set aside tic-tac-toe for now and dive into my next app. It will be used to track an apprenticeship and I’m going to wire it up using Sinatra. Since I’ve never used Sinatra I’ve been reading through some documentation the last couple days and today started learning how to integrate Cucumber.

Nettuts actually has a pretty good tutorial on serving up your first few pages with Sinatra, taking in some parameters, and then integrating Cucumber with Capybara. I was messing around on my own before I started the tutorial and I think one of my files is off because I’ve hit a snag—my tests get hung up and I have to manually quit them. However, after I integrated the steps definition file from the cucumber-sinatra gem everything worked great. Unfortunately there’s just a few too many ‘freebies’ in this file (like 200 lines worth of freebies) for me to feel comfortable just using it, but at least it got me going. Once I have a little more experience with tying all of this together I’ll write a more in depth post.

I’ve also spent the last couple of days digging into the source code for one of 8th Light’s internal apps and it’s been awesome to dive in and explore a web app again- especially one built like this. It really did feel like I dove into some beautiful lagoon where I get to swim around and see all these design patterns up close that I’ve only read about in books. There’s definitely going to be a few posts coming out of it.