Grunt-based JavaScript CodeShip build

I have been playing around with CodeShip lately. I really like it! Here's what I'm doing for Grunt-based builds on CodeShip, running the Jasmine specifications on Karma with PhantomJS.

Setup Commands

gem install compass
nvm install 0.10.33
nvm use 0.10.33
npm install
npm install -g grunt-cli
npm install -g bower
bower install

Test Commands

grunt test

Creating a Rails 4.1 app using JRuby

Notes around creating a Rails 4.1.8 application on JRuby 1.7.16.1.

Creating application

Using RVM to manage my rubies.

rvm use jruby-1.7.16.1
gem install rails
rails new .

Configuring Rails app for PostgreSQL and JDBC

Add the following to the Gemfile.

gem 'activerecord-jdbcpostgresql-adapter'

Also add the following towards the top of the Gemfile.

ruby '1.9.3', :engine => 'jruby', :engine_version => '1.7.16.1'

My Gemfile as it currently stands:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

ruby '1.9.3', :engine => 'jruby', :engine_version => '1.7.16.1'

gem 'rails', '4.1.8'
gem 'activerecord-jdbcpostgresql-adapter'
gem 'sass-rails', '~> 4.0.3'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.3.0'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 4.0.0'
gem 'therubyrhino'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'turbolinks'
gem 'jbuilder', '~> 2.0'
gem 'sdoc', '~> 0.4.0', group: :doc
gem 'puma'

Configuring database.yml

Set up your databases environments, similar to what I have here:

default: &default
  adapter: jdbcpostgresql
  encoding: unicode

development:
  <<: *default
  host: localhost
  database: foobar_development
  username: postgres
  password: postgres

test:
  <<: *default
  host: localhost
  database: foobar_test
  username: postgres
  password: postgres

production:
  <<: *default
  host: localhost
  database: foobar_production
  username: postgres
  password: postgres

Exposing PostgreSQL on vagrant to host OS

I've been working with vagrant lately on a Ruby project and I wanted to the ability to view the PostgreSQL database on the vagrant image through DbVisualizer on my OS X system. This is quite easy to set up in PostgreSQL and vagrant.

1. Add a port forwarding entry to your Vagrantfile: config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 5432, host: 15432. I'm using Vagrant 1.6.3 here. Start/restart your Vagrant image.
2. Edit the pg_hba.conf file on the vagrant image. This file may reside in different areas; ours was in /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/. Change the IPv4 local connections entry from...

   host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
   

   to

   host    all             all             0.0.0.0/0               trust
   

3. Restart PostgreSQL on the vagrant image: sudo service postgresql restart
4. Configure your database tool to connect to localhost, port 15432.

You should be able to connect to your Vagrant PostgreSQL databases now.

NAT port forwarding in VMware Fusion 6

More of a reminder to myself than anything. Found this blog posting really helpful for enabling NAT port forwarding in a VMware Fusion 6 virtual machine. Important that you restart VMware Fusion after making this change. Just restarting the VM will not pick up the change to nat.conf.

Resolving issue with Yeoman-generated Angular web project and the jasmine framework provider

I'm kicking off a new Angular web client project today and I'm using Yeoman to get me up and going here. Seems the angular-generator for Yeoman doesn't properly link in the plugins needed for running Jasmine specs within karma, reported on this StackOverflow question. Add the following to your karma.conf.js file in the project root directory:

plugins: [
    'karma-jasmine',
    'karma-coverage',
    'karma-junit-reporter',
    'karma-phantomjs-launcher',
    'karma-chrome-launcher',
    'karma-safari-launcher',
    'karma-firefox-launcher',
    'karma-ie-launcher'
],

I also needed to install these node packages and save the configuration to the package.json file:

npm install karma-jasmine --save-dev
npm install karma-coverage --save-dev
npm install karma-junit-reporter --save-dev
npm install karma-phantomjs-launcher --save-dev
npm install karma-safari-launcher --save-dev
npm install karma-firefox-launcher --save-dev

Using the pound key as a valid choice in a Tropo ask

More of a reminder to myself, but might be useful for others, as I found this through trial and error. We have an ask in our call flow that wants to capture the pound key (#) as a valid choice. Seems easy enough, just add the pound symbol '#' as a choice to the choices array. But that alone doesn't work. You also have to assign a different terminator to the ask (e.g. '*'). You won't actually use the terminator, but reassigning the terminator to something other than '#' seems to free '#' up to be used as a valid choice.

Getting websocket-rails up and running on Heroku

I wanted to document my endeavors to get websocket-rails up and running on Heroku. In my case, I'll be adding Redis to the mix, as I'm trigger server-side events from a worker process that is running delayed_job tasks. Thus, in a multi-process environment, Redis has to be used to communicate from the worker process to the Rails process (which actually maintains the web socket infrastructure). My experiences with setting this all up were actually quite pleasant and things just worked without many issues. The documentation for websocket-rails could benefit from elaborating some non-development environment scenarios, but that's a very minor gripe.

---

Step 1: Get the solution running in development

Pretty straight-forward. You have to get everything working in your development environment. Nothing earth shattering here, but if you plan on triggering server-side events to your JavaScript clients from something like delayed_job, you will need to use Redis. I'm using OS X Mavericks here, so I install tools through Homebrew. Here's how I got Redis up and running in my environment:

1. Install via Homebrew: brew install redis
2. Start up Redis from the command line: redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

If you need to monitor Redis, use the redis-cli: redis-cli monitor Now that we have Redis up and running, get websocket-rails integrated into your application. I won't belabor how to do that--the documentation does a good job of detailing how. I use a channel to communicate from the client-side and the server-side. Another thing to note is that for anything I do on the client that I want an event for coming from the server, I use a correlation ID from the client-side that I can keep track of on the client-side, so when an event from the server-side is received, I can determine whether I'm interested in it because it contains the original correlation ID. Read more here about the correlation ID design pattern.

---

Step 2: Get the solution running on Heroku

Now that everything works in development, I needed to get the solution out to Heroku.

1. If you previously installed SSL, you will have to disable it before enabling websockets support. Remove the certificates: heroku certs:remove, then remove SSL support through the Dashboard.
2. Enable websockets support: heroku labs:enable websockets
3. Add a Redis provider Heroku addon to the app if you haven't done that already. Note the Redis connection information.
4. Update the websocket_rails.rb initializer with the Redis connection information. I had to add some conditional logic to determine which environment I was deployed in. Also import here is that host and port won't typically be enough to connect to a Redis add-on. You'll definitely need a password and probably a username. Those can be passed through the redis options in this initializer. Currently my websocket_rails initializer has some code in it like this:

   
       if ENV["RAILS_ENV"] == 'production'
           config.redis_options = {
               username: 'rediscloud',
               password: 'UHDDBHD&*#$DFkkdfha',
               host: 'pub-redis-88885.us-east-1-3.3.ec2.redisdomecity.com',
               port: '15204'
           }
       else
           config.redis_options = {
               host: 'localhost',
               port: '6379'
           }
       end
   
   

   This will invariably change so I can differentiate between staging and production, but you get the point.

Doing all this I was able to get the websocket-rails stuff to work and have not had any issues with it, even with dynes spinning up and down.

Installing pillow on OS X Mavericks with Xcode 5.1

I've been doing some Python and Google App Engine development lately and I hit an issue with clang throwing an error like the following....

---

cc -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -dynamic -g -Os -pipe -fno-common -fno-strict-aliasing -fwrapv -mno-fused-madd -DENABLE_DTRACE -DMACOSX -DNDEBUG -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wshorten-64-to-32 -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -Os -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -DENABLE_DTRACE -pipe -arch x86_64 -DHAVE_LIBJPEG -DHAVE_LIBZ -I/System/Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Headers -I/System/Library/Frameworks/Tk.framework/Headers -I/usr/local/include/freetype2 -IlibImaging -I/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/include -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include -I/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/include/python2.7 -c _imaging.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.9-intel-2.7/_imaging.o

clang: error: unknown argument: '-mno-fused-madd' [-Wunused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future]

clang: note: this will be a hard error (cannot be downgraded to a warning) in the future

error: command 'cc' failed with exit status 1

---

The following discussion helped: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22334776/installing-pillow-pil-on-mavericks I've had more issues with the March 2014 version of the Command Line Tools for Mavericks. Grrrr.

Copy as HTML plugin in RubyMine

Just a quick note: the Copy as HTML plugin does not show up in the RubyMine 6 plugins listing. But if you download it from here, and install it from disk through the Plugins preferences page, it will work flawlessly in RubyMine. Not sure why it does get listed, but it's a great plugin nonetheless.

Using Teacup to style individual UIView components

I've been doing a bunch of RubyMotion development lately and I'm continually amazed at the power of this framework. One of the many great tools available to RubyMotion developers is Teacup, a UI view layout and styling domain-specific library (DSL). I think DSLs are one of the big advantages that RubyMotion has over traditional native iOS development using Objective-C and Xcode. More information on Teacup here. There's tons of documentation around using Teacup with UIViewControllers, but scant documentation on using Teacup with custom UIView components. There are times that you cannot style a UIView or subclass when the view is initially rendered. Examples include table cells and table headers. Well, don't fear, because you can always mix-in the Teacup layout behavior into any old Ruby class and get that functionality. Below is a table view header helper class that creates new UIView objects with a UILabel subview. Notice how I mix in the Teacup::Layout behavior into the helper and then I have access to all the Teacup stylesheet and layout functionality.

 1 class TableViewHeaderHelper
 2     include Teacup::Layout
 3 
 4     stylesheet :table_view_header
 5 
 6     def create(frame, title)
 7         view = UIView.alloc.initWithFrame(frame)
 8         view.stylename = :root
 9         layout(view) do
10             label = subview(UILabel, :label)
11             label.text = title
12         end
13         view
14     end
15 
16 end

In this above example, the factory method takes a frame and a title for the header. I create the root UIView and then pass that to the Teacup layout to do the rest of the composite magic. Since the title is dynamic, I get a reference to the created UILabel and set the text of the label to the title string passed into the factory method.

Next up is the Teacup stylesheet. This sits in app/styles/styles.rb in my RubyMotion application. I defined a couple of global UIColor objects and then define the table_view_header style for use in the TableViewHeaderHelper class previously shown. The rest of this is standard Teacup functionality, so I won't repeat what they have already documented.

 1 sectionBackgroundColor = UIColor.colorWithRed(221/255.0, 
 2                                               green: 238/255.0, 
 3                                               blue: 249/255.0, 
 4                                               alpha: 1.0)
 5 headerTextColor = UIColor.colorWithRed(50/255.0, 
 6                                        green: 50/255.0, 
 7                                        blue: 50/255.0, 
 8                                        alpha: 1.0)
 9 
10 Teacup::Stylesheet.new :table_view_header do
11 
12     style :root,
13           backgroundColor: sectionBackgroundColor
14 
15     style :label,
16           top: 1, 
17           left: 15, 
18           width: 500, 
19           height: 40,
20           font: :bold.uifont(20),
21           textColor: headerTextColor
22 end

Finally are the UITableViewDelegate protocol methods that I implemented to get a custom header for my UITableView. Note that the frame height used for constructing the UIView in the TableViewHeaderHelper is ignored, and the UITableViewDelegate heightForHeaderInSection:section method is used to determine the header height instead. Kind of strange, but it works.

 1     def tableView(tableView, viewForHeaderInSection: section)
 2         frame = CGRectMake(0, 0, tableView.frame.size.width, 1)
 3         title = "#{@league.name}: My Stations by date"
 4         TableViewHeaderHelper.new.create(frame,
 5                                          title)
 6     end
 7 
 8     def tableView(tableView, heightForHeaderInSection:section)
 9         50
10     end

Google App Engine\Python: Using the task queue with a reverse proxy or SSH tunnel

This is more a note for myself. When using forward, a SSH tunnel Ruby gem from the folks at forwardhq.com, Google App Engine\Python devserver will barf trying to resolve the Host header when dispatching tasks on the task queue. In my case, my tunnel hostname was coming through in the Host header, causing the KeyError in _port_registry.get(port) invocation.

dispatcher.py

---

  def _resolve_target(self, hostname, path):
    if self._port == 80:
      default_address = self.host
    else:
      default_address = '%s:%s' % (self.host, self._port)
    if not hostname or hostname == default_address:
      return self._module_for_request(path), None

    default_address_offset = hostname.find(default_address)
    if default_address_offset > 0:
      prefix = hostname[:default_address_offset - 1]
      # The prefix should be 'module', but might be 'instance.version.module',
      # 'version.module', or 'instance.module'. These alternatives work in
      # production, but devappserver2 doesn't support running multiple versions
      # of the same module. All we can really do is route to the default
      # version of the specified module.
      if '.' in prefix:
        logging.warning('Ignoring instance/version in %s; multiple versions '
                        'are not supported in devappserver.', prefix)
      module_name = prefix.split('.')[-1]
      return self._get_module_with_soft_routing(module_name, None), None

    else:
      if ':' in hostname:
        port = int(hostname.split(':', 1)[1])
      else:
        port = 80
      try:
        _module, inst = self._port_registry.get(port)
      except KeyError:
        raise request_info.ModuleDoesNotExistError(hostname)
        _module, inst = None, None
    if not _module:
      _module = self._module_for_request(path)
    return _module, inst

---

The line in red is the line that is barfing. Comment out the raise error line and set _module and inst to None, allowing execution to continue and the next line will test if _module hasn't been set and will go ahead and resolve it. Found the temporary fix from https://github.com/dylanvee/homebrew-gae_sdk. Hopefully this is something the GAE people can fix in upcoming versions of GAE\Python SDK.

Rubymotion: Controlling Info.plist generation with environment variables

I've been doing a fair amount of Rubymotion development these days and one trick that I'm using in my local development is to control the generation of the Info.plist via environment variables and some Ruby coding in the Rakefile. I can't stop raving about the excellent tools and development cadence that Rubymotion affords the iOS developer. I really like that I'm working out of Rubymine and not Xcode and using standard Ruby tools like rake and Bundler.

Like I said, using rake, you have the opportunity to change your Info.plist because it's generated through the rake process. I have a login view that needs a username and password entered into the text fields. I've rigged it up that these are prepopulated when working in dev, using environment variables and adding some logic to my Rakefile and the view controller. First up are the environment variables:

export DEV_MODE="true"
export DEV_USERNAME="chris.bartling@mycompany.net"
export DEV_PASSWORD="fahj2734hfjg86776dg$48df676"

Nothing earth shattering here. Normal environment variable assignments. Next up is the Rakefile changes:

Motion::Project::App.setup do |app|
    
	...    

    if ENV['DEV_MODE']
        puts '==========================================='
        puts '===> Using DEV_MODE Info.plist values <===='
        puts '==========================================='

        app.info_plist['DEV_USERNAME'] = ENV['DEV_USERNAME']
        app.info_plist['DEV_PASSWORD'] = ENV['DEV_PASSWORD']
    end

    app.pods do
        ....
    end
end

Again, pretty simple Ruby stuff here. If the DEV_HOME environment variable is set, add the username and password to the Info.plist during generation. Now, in your app, you can reference these values in your viewDidLoad method of your view controller, prepopulating the UI elements in your views:

dev_username = NSBundle.mainBundle.objectForInfoDictionaryKey('DEV_USERNAME')
dev_password = NSBundle.mainBundle.objectForInfoDictionaryKey('DEV_PASSWORD')
@email_field.text = dev_username || ''
@password_field.text = dev_password || ''

I probably sound like a broken record, but if you haven't used Rubymotion, definitely give it a try. Much different developer experience using Rubymotion tools vs. Apple's Xcode tooling.

Retrieving logs from your deployed Google App Engine Java application

If you need to see your application logs from your deployed Google App Engine (GAE) Java application, you can use the GAE appcfg.sh tool to do so. Issue the following command from your GAE app directory:

appcfg.sh --num_days=0 --severity=0 request_logs ./web ./logs/gae.log

where:

--num_days=0 will retrieve all of the logs available,
--severity=0 will retrieve DEBUG and above log levels,
./web is where the ./WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml descriptor file can be found, and
./logs/gae.log is the local log file to write records to.

There are other options available for this command. Execute appcfg.sh help request_logs to see more information on the options available for request logs command. This will dump all of your logs and they will not be truncated like they are in the Logs view of the GAE administration application.

CoffeeScript Application Development by Ian Young

I had the opportunity to read CoffeeScript Application Development by Ian Young recently and thought I would put together a book review.

The author does a nice job describing why parentheses are required for executing CoffeeScript no-argument functions. This is an idiom that I have seen many developers trip over when first coming to CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript preserves JavaScript’s view of functions as first-class citizens. Parentheses are optional except when necessary to avoid ambiguity.

The author gives some nice examples of loop comprehensions, one of the snazzier features of CoffeeScript. Loop comprehensions come from Python and they make for a more readable way to iterate a list and selectively act on list elements which meet a certain criteria. I’m always looking for more examples of loop comprehensions in CoffeeScript and this book has some nice examples.

The CoffeeScript switch statement is explained thoroughly. This is a handy flow-control statement that works really well in its incarnation in CoffeeScript. There are numerous examples in the book where different usage scenarios are demonstrated. Very handy and welcomed.

I found the author’s treatment of classes and inheritance in CoffeeScript to be a nice, gentle introduction. The examples that are given in the book work well and the explanations that accompany the examples are clear and concise. It would have been nice to get an explanation of the boilerplate code that CoffeeScript generates for you when defining a class, but I guess that’s considered part of the magic of CoffeeScript. It isn’t until the discussion on inheritance that the author starts to poke his head under the hood to investigate the generated JavaScript. The inheritance discussion is extremely valuable and a big plus for this book. If you get this book for anything, it’s for this discussion. CoffeeScript is doing a whole bunch of interesting stuff when creating classes and implementing inheritance, and this is one of the first times that I have seen the generated JavaScript described line by line.

In typical fashion, the author introduces the fat arrow syntax in a gentle manner, clearly explaining the reasoning for such a feature. The author then gives a very good explanation why you should not overuse the fat arrow syntax in your CoffeeScript (hint, it’s due to memory usage). He also includes a very succinct definition and example around memoization in CoffeeScript. This is a feature that I have not had much exposure to, so it was great to see it described and used in an example.

IcedCoffeeScript is introduced in the chapter on Going Asynchronous. I have not used IcedCoffeeScript, so that was an interesting exploration into an extension to CoffeeScript for managing asynchronous invocations. Looks interesting.

The topic of debugging CoffeeScript is broached. This is an interesting subject, as I have seen a few developers really get frustrated with the mapping of generated JavaScript back to the original CoffeeScript. Luckily the author introduces source maps, which does this work for us. The author shows us how to set this feature up in Firefox and Chrome developer tools. Your mileage will vary on this feature, but it is an interesting tool for easing the inertia of moving to CoffeeScript. This discussion comes with a lot of screenshots that help you understand how the source maps feature can be used in the developer tools.

Overall I really liked this book and it’s a worthy addition to my other documentation on CoffeeScript. Link to the book

Debugging Before and After hooks in Cucumber

Had a heck of time trying to figure out why all my Cucumber steps were completing successfully, but my Cucumber scenario would fail. Seems that I had an issue with the web app that I was testing which would hit a REST endpoint asynchronously during the Cucumber scenario, causing an error. Cucumber seems to eat this normally, but running with the command line option of --format pretty dumps the backtrace of the exception. Blogging about this so I don't forget about it. Reference: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cukes/WTJDVWGQkTM

Python Imaging Library (PIL) on OS X Mavericks

Upgraded to Mavericks (10.9) over the weekend, not taking into account my current Python/Google App Engine development work. Thus, this Monday morning, I'm spending some quality time getting my Python environment back up and running. One of the things that I needed to re-install in this new environment is PIL or the Python Imaging Library. Unfortunately, doing a naïve pip install results in an error when looking for an X11 header file. This StackOverflow comment solved my problem, so I'm sharing with others who might get hung up on PIL on Mavericks. The pre-built PIL stuff doesn't seem to install on Mavericks, so the pip install seems to be the way to go for 10.9/Mavericks.

MySQL useCursorFetch property and Grails 2.2.4

Just hit a problem with using the useCursorFetch property in Grails 2.2.4. It may be present in earlier versions of Grails 2, but this was working up through Grails 1.3.9. I'm upgrading a Grails 1.3.9 application to Grails 2.2.4 and hit the following runtime exception when the JDBC URL has the useCursorFetch property set to true.

---

| Error 2013-08-19 09:05:50,365 [localhost-startStop-1] ERROR context.GrailsContextLoader  - Error initializing the application: java.lang.LinkageError: Illegal class file encountered. Try running with -Xverify:all in method executeBatchSerially
Message: java.lang.LinkageError: Illegal class file encountered. Try running with -Xverify:all in method executeBatchSerially
   Line | Method
->> 308 | evaluateEnvironmentSpecificBlock in grails.util.Environment
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
|   301 | executeForEnvironment            in     ''
|   277 | executeForCurrentEnvironment . . in     ''
|   303 | innerRun                         in java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync
|   138 | run . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  in java.util.concurrent.FutureTask
|   895 | runTask                          in java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker
|   918 | run . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  in     ''
^   680 | run                              in java.lang.Thread

Caused by LinkageError: Illegal class file encountered. Try running with -Xverify:all in method executeBatchSerially
->> 4566 | prepareStatement                 in com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
|   4479 | prepareStatement                 in     ''
|   281 | prepareStatement . . . . . . . . in org.apache.commons.dbcp.DelegatingConnection
|   313 | prepareStatement                 in org.apache.commons.dbcp.PoolingDataSource$PoolGuardConnectionWrapper
|   111 | methodMissing . . . . . . . . .  in org.grails.datastore.gorm.GormStaticApi
|    56 | loadUsersAndRoles                in com.vocabra.eventlogging.services.DefaultDataLoaderService
|    22 | load . . . . . . . . . . . . . . in     ''
|   165 | doCall                           in GrailsMelodyGrailsPlugin$_closure4_closure15_closure16
|    18 | doCall . . . . . . . . . . . . . in BootStrap$_closure1
|   308 | evaluateEnvironmentSpecificBlock in grails.util.Environment
|   301 | executeForEnvironment . . . . .  in     ''
|   277 | executeForCurrentEnvironment     in     ''
|   303 | innerRun . . . . . . . . . . . . in java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync
|   138 | run                              in java.util.concurrent.FutureTask
|   895 | runTask . . . . . . . . . . . .  in java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker
|   918 | run                              in     ''
^   680 | run . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  in java.lang.Thread

---

Removing the property from the JDBC URL resolves the issue. Need to do more research into why this is happening.

When is a user story done?

I am beginning to hate the word "done". It means so many different things in software development and causes so much confusion that I am trying not to use the term, instead opting for statements which convey much more information and provide more transparency into our product development efforts.

In the past, I have been asked to figure out why two development groups under a common work area have radically different velocities and thus are being viewed much differently by management. The first group is chewing up stories, the other, not so much. Looking at the user stories of each group, differences between the two groups definitely exist. The "higher performing" group have simple stories with a few acceptance criteria. The acceptance criteria seem very high level; my gut feeling is that the acceptance criteria would be difficult to turn into actual acceptance tests. The "lower performing" group has more acceptance criteria which are more concrete--I can visualize actual acceptance tests with these criteria. Digging into the groups a bit more, it becomes apparent that the "higher performing" group's quality assurance effort is behind the development group in completion, but the group is considering stories "done" when the developers reach code complete. The "lower performing" group does not claim a story completed until it has been verified by quality assurance and the customer has signed off on the functionality (usually through some demonstration of the functionality).

So which group is really the high performer here? Saying a story is done when code complete is a misnomer and is likely building a false reality of where the group really is at. This "higher performing" group is setting themselves up for a big fall--there is no sense of quality assurance complete or customer complete.

Some in the agile community call this "done, done, done". I guess that's OK, but I think we need to be really careful with our terminology as we communicate within our development groups and outside of the development group to shareholders. I feel we should use specific terminology to describe where a story currently resides in the "done" spectrum. Daniel Gullo has a good article about this. He enumerates criteria for completion:

• “Code complete”: Development completed, including accompanying unit tests (assumption here is that everyone is operating under test-driven development).
• “Unit tested”: Unit tests completed. I don't really care for this designation, especially since my groups engage in test-driven development. I would call this Acceptance tested or something like that. Basically, demonstrate that we have satisfied the conditions for completion (aka acceptance criteria). Hopefully most of these acceptance tests are automated and have been written concurrently during the iteration by QA with the cooperation of the developers.
• “Peer reviewed”: Developer code reviews completed. I like this concept when paired with feature branching and pull requests.
• “QA complete”: QA testing, automated and exploratory, completed. I like having this as a separate stage-gate, allowing for exploratory testing by QA.
• “Documented”: As needed. There's probably another blog post here around documentation and the agile process, but I will leave that alone for a while.

Now there is little ambiguity as to where a story stands when using this terminology. I may throw another level in there, customer complete, when the customer signs off on the newly developed feature. Thoughts? How do you communicate when a story is complete?

Connecting DbVisualizer to Heroku PostgreSQL database

Just a quick note on how to connect DbVisualizer to a Heroku PostgreSQL database. The trick is to get the SSL stuff to work, as DbVisualizer needs to be told to use a SSL factory (via the sslfactory driver property). I used the 'org.postgresql.ssl.NonValidatingFactory' SSL factory. I set this property and the ssl property (to true) in the Properties tab of the connection information. The rest of the connection information you need to get from Heroku, in particular the Heroku database configuration. Go to your Heroku dashboard, drill into your app of interest and click on the Heroku Postgres link (mine was labelled "Heroku Postgres Dev"). This will take you to the herokupostgres setting for your application. Click on the bi-directional arrows icon (Connection Settings) and you can find your connection setting there. I used the JDBC properties and filled out the Server Info settings format. This format seems to work better in DbVisualizer. Also allows you to ping the database server.

Jasmine spying on jQuery selectors

Quick blog post about how to spy for jQuery selectors. Say I want to write something like the following:

var $element = $('div.my-element');

How would you write a Jasmine specification to drive this line of code in a Backbone.View function? Here it is:

it("find the element using a jQuery selector", function() {
   var spy = spyOn(jQuery.fn, 'find');
   this.view.doSomething();
   expect(spy).toHaveBeenCalledWith('div.my-element');
});

The reason you can do this is that $(selector, context) becomes $(context).find(selector). By default, selectors perform their searches within the DOM starting at the document root. However, an alternate context can be given for the search by using the optional second parameter to the $() function (from http://api.jquery.com/jQuery/#jQuery1). Had to write this down in a blog so I remember it again some day. Cheers!