On Jan 28, 2008 12:01 PM, Jay Donnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm starting a new project and I want to try writing the client first. I.e. I > want to write my 'views' first and I would like to mock out all the models in > such a way that I can run the site and browse it with the mocked out models. > Is it easy to use rspec's mocking for this sort of thing and has anyone done > it before? Does anyone know of a tutorial out there for doing something like > this?
That's not really what mocks are for. Mocks are a testing tool that help you discover the interactions between objects in your code. I'd say the best way is to develop in small iterations. Write a story that represents a very small, but useful bit of functionality. Implement it, going outside-in, and then when the story is completed you've got something. Then work on the next story. It would probably be a bad idea to implement the site backed by mocks, because you end up going top-down instead of outside-in. There's a big difference. Top-down is implementing a layer for the entire application, then moving to the layer it depends on, all the way down until the app runs. The problem with that is that the feedback loop is very wide, both in a development and business sense. In a development sense, you don't really know that your app works until you type that final character that brings the whole thing together. In a business sense, you end up doing a lot of dev work before you find out if the feature you've built is acceptable (that's where stories come in as well, defining acceptance criteria). It *is* a good idea to sometimes work on the interaction flow before writing a bunch of Rails code, but that should really be done with plain HTML wireframes, no application coding. Pat _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
