Skuunk Works

I have been using Cucumber ( http://cukes.info/ ) at my current gig for about a year now. My initial reaction was that I absolutely hated it. It didn't seem to make sense for a programmer to write out tests (features) in plain English and then write out a bunch of regular expressions to turn that plain English into runnable code. What a palaver! The other problem, is that the Cucumber tests were extremely fragile. Even making text and/or HTML changes would break things in lots of random places. Anyways, as it turns out, I don't really hate Cucumber, I just hate the way it is implemented in my current gig. Here are some lessons I learnt on the way... 1) Features are not supposed to be written by programmers. You can write features as a programmer, but you are not the intended audience. The reason why features are written in plain text is that they are supposed to be written by business owners. As a programmer though, you can use features to organize your thoughts in plain Engli

So the other day, I needed to cache an action which was basically a proxy action to return JSON. Basically, 3rd party company X has an XML API for it's deals. Ideally we would use JavaScript to pull the feed, but unfortunately, the feed is using XML which means we need to use the server to pull this "deal" and then reformat it in JSON for our site to use. To render the JSON we were using a render call render offer.to_json It can get expensive to pull this deal over the wire every time, so we looked into using caches action and set it to expire in 5 minutes (because that is how often the deal feed updates). caches_action :index, :expires_in => 5.minutes (Oh, also we need to turn caching on in dev to see this happening) config.action_controller.perform_caching = true While this worked fine for the first call, I noticed that in the subsequent calls, the application type was being set to 'text/html' instead of 'application/json'. This was causing the