Refactorings

So I’m beginning the new year (technically started the beginning of December) with two new projects. With these new projects I decided to finally take the opportunity to do a couple things I’ve wanted to do for a while: use Rails and use Git.

Rails I hadn’t used for anything because truthfully I didn’t really feel like deploying my applications using fastcgi or mongrel, I just didn’t want to mess with it. Then I took a look at Phusion Passenger, it was exactly what I had been waiting for.

I made the plunge!

I’m still at the very early stages of the projects, but I had a couple thoughts on starting to use both pieces of software:

Git

Not a lot to report here. It does a lot of the same stuff I’m used to, but has a lot of other cool features. I’m mostly jazzed about the ‘stash’ command, as that will speed up trying out new features on a branch greatly for me. The only thing that I’m not excited about is the commit serials. Maybe I’ve just been doing it for so long, but when working with other people I find it particularly easy to refer to changesets as 8999 or 12391. The serial seems a little more cumbersome, but I’m still at the beginning stages, so I may find an easy / convenient way of handling this in the future.

Rails

So far this has been great. I had done some pet projects in rails 1 and played with rails 2 when it came out. The biggest boon for me so far has been that when I started to work on my project, I was equally unfamiliar with (controller)action / view layers as I was with the testing components, so I sat down and learned the testing components *first*. This so far has turned out great because I roughed out the near entirety of one of my apps functionality in unit and functional tests before really writing much of the standard app at all. I ended up with great test coverage (thanks rcov!). I really like the quality of the rails plugins I’ve encountered so far. ActiveMerchant is so easy to use compare to alot of other payment gateway libraries I’ve used in PHP land and if feels good to be saying collection.size again instead of count(collection).