Taming Rails Apps with Engines
As the engineering team was planning for the recent Socialcast release we realized we were going to be adding a couple of significant new functional areas that each had their own models, views, assets, etc. We were concerned that this could result in a sprawling code base that was hard to learn and maintain. We came up with two ways to solve this in our Ruby on Rails application: either we could break it down into multiple applications and use API calls or we could isolate the functional areas using Rails Engines. We knew that we wanted a seamless, integrated experience that was easy to maintain so we decided to move forward with the Engines approach.… Read more »jQuery Custom Events
Overview In the last article about unobtrusive JavaScript, we learned how to use event delegation and markup-driven behavior to create reusable JavaScript components. This article will explore how to use custom events in jQuery to give the developer even greater control over the component's behavior. While many facets of an unobtrusive widget can be controlled via the markup (data attributes), we can expose even more to the developer by triggering custom events. These events are fired on the DOM just like normal browser events, with the same bubbling characteristics. In jQuery, it's as simple as this:… Read more »
jQuery custom “remove” event with Chrome 24
On January 10th 2013, Google released version 24 of Chrome, which included an unexpected feature: the native remove() method of an HTML element: It's essentially a shortcut for this: element.parentNode.… Read more »Unobtrusive JavaScript
What it used to mean The meaning of the phrase unobtrusive JavaScript has changed since jQuery came around. To understand this change, let's first go back to when we used to write code like this: <form class="validated_form" onsubmit="return validateForm(this)"> This is definitely obtrusive JavaScript, since the code is directly embedded in the HTML tags.… Read more »
How We Reduced Our Rails Test Runtimes By 10x
Testing code is a core requirement for delivering quality software products. Like many others, at Socialcast we strive for comprehensive automated test coverage, and apply tight quality controls -- including, but not limited to, requiring that each code release passes all tests with no failures in a controlled, continuous-integration (CI) testing environment. In order to iteratively develop and quickly deliver innovations and improvements to our products, it's imperative that we keep the testing feedback cycle quick. Slow test suites mean that developers are less likely to execute the complete set of tests before promoting code, increasing the likelihood of CI test failures. Worse, they also increase the cost and risk of those failures:… Read more »Sign up to receive email communications regarding events, webinars, and product news.
