Comments on: Beautiful code

By: dagfinn

dagfinn — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:41:13 +0000

I know what you’re talking about. I’m have Ruby project going myself. I agree with you, except I find the word “terrible” hugely exaggerated. Instead I would say that Ruby is even better for this kind of API. All programming languages have their pros and cons.

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:39:43 +0000

If you think this is “expressive”, you need to look at Ruby. I build my web applications entirely in PHP, but build utilities around them for the sysadmins, and build them purely in Python and Ruby. PHP code itself is terrible.

By: Open

Open — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:14:25 +0000

The code looks terrible.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:17:16 +0000

Crickey

That is a painful way to write selenium. I do a lot of selenium i found that far the easiest way is just to write some simple functions to write html that selenium ide understands and put id tags in all the html elements that you'll wanna access, i.e.

$a[] = array('assertText,'myelem','abc');
test('mytest',$a);

making your own DSL ou've got an inner platform effect where you've created a new language (DSL) just to write another language (selenium). very pointless IMO.

By: dagfinn

dagfinn — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:34:59 +0000

You’re absolutely right, there are some things that can only be tested manually. The most obvious may be the visual design of the page.

By: nico

nico — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:46:34 +0000

dagfinn, I get your point, but you’ll have to agree that probably that is not the best example ever!

I have to say, though, I’m a bit skeptical about automatic testing of pages. The way I prefer to debug code is to actually try it as an user would do, and try to break it, as users do.
The automatic testing is probably good for “internal” pages (for instance hidden to the user) but it takes time to write, and it’s not guaranteed to give you “bug-free” code.

What if, for instance, the user changes or exploits some javascript of your page? That you can only check by actually trying to do those things and see what happens.

By: dagfinn

dagfinn — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:42:42 +0000

@Nigel: You don’t have like it as far as I’m concerned. But let me just say that the reason I find it readable is that it reads almost like an sentence in English.

By: David

David — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:53:44 +0000

What is ‘withName’ in that example… I don’t understand how that code would work unless withName is a function within local scope

By: Nigel

Nigel — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:11:25 +0000

Yeah, I think that code looks gross.

Not eas to read if you ask me

By: dagfinn

dagfinn — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:00:54 +0000

I can’t conjure up a complete example on the fly, but I can explain what the point is. The intent is automated testing. As you say, you created the page, but then maybe later you broke it, maybe even while changing something code you thought was unrelated. Instead of the page with the select menu, there may be a page that says “fatal error…”,for instance. To avoid those situations, I want a test script I can run that will check that everything is still in place without my having to test all of it manually.