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We all need to test our code on Internet Explorer and when set up correctly, this can be the best way.

I’m not going to go over installing Ruby, MySQL (you need version 5.0), Apache etc as there are a million and one tutorials out there. I will mention however that you can save yourself some time by simply connecting to your development server (remember, you will need to open up your SQL server for remote access). I’m also not going to go over setting up selenium profiles as I’m assuming you’ve already got your tests running under a *nix environment.

Now once you’ve got your applications installed and checked out a copy of your code you need to make sure you have the right gems – exactly the same set as you needed on your development server, although I would also recommend win32console as it will give you the text colouring on your test output (and also randomly remove all of the letter As. No, really!).

Now comes the fun part. There are a series of hacks you need to do to Ruby and its gems to get them working under Windows:

• Install MySQL 5.0 if you haven’t already and copy libmySQL.dll from the MySQL bin folder to the Ruby bin folder, overwriting the default version.
• Change any reference to IP ‘0.0.0.0′ to ‘127.0.0.1′ in the webrat gem. This is needed because Windows will not view ‘0.0.0.0′ as localhost.
• Add ’start’ before the ‘mongrel_rails’ command in the ’start_command’ function in ‘\selenium\application_servers\rails.rb’. This will cause the mongrel server to be run in a new console window which is needed because the mongrel *nix detach flag does not work in a Windows console.
• Add ‘-interactive -forcedBrowserMode iexplore’ to the start command in ‘\lib\selenium\remote_control\remote_control.rb’.
• Increase your timeouts
  • Add ‘config.selenium_browser_startup_timeout = 50′ to your selenium profile.
  • Timeouts also defined in ‘\selenium\selenium_rc_server.rb
• Make sure you have your browser set correctly in your selenium profile with the correct path. Something along the lines of:
  • config.selenium_browser_key = ‘*iexplore C:\Program files\Internet Explorer\ie.exe’

Then run your tests and you should find your tests running quite happily.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve got heavily into agile methodologies – in particular, Scrum and Kanban. Here are three of our task boards, from three of our current main projects.

This first board has evolved from a Kanban board introduced by Andy P. It features the Icebox, Todo, On Hold, In Progress (limited to 2 stories at a time) and a Review column. Done tickets are stuck to a nearby wall – with competitions as to who can get them the highest with a running jump!

This rather messy Scrum board is a work in progress, and utilises the three windows between one of our offices and the games room. It features a full product backlog, a sprint backlog, In Progress and Done (‘Done Done’!). Team members like to place the postits below individual members/pair names so we’ve added this on.

Our last board is a modest but effective Kanban approach for a small team. One thing that’s interesting with this project is that initially the team didn’t have a daily standup/scrum – but after using the board for a couple of weeks, they felt one would help them keep each other updated so started one.

We’ve really felt the benefit of agile working, and the ‘informative office environment’ is a big part of it. I personally have a lot of love for tools like Pivotal Tracker, having previously used it on a big project – but there’s definitely something to be said for the tangible Post-It note plus Sharpie formula.

Just a quick one to say thanks to everyone who came to NWRUG last night! A good time was had by all, and thanks to @will_j for organising, and to @leehambley for being my fellow speaker. It was great to see you all and share a beer or two.

See you at the September event; it promises to be a good one!

Update: Lee’s presentation is available at slideshare. As my presentation was more of a live coding demo (I’m braver than him!), we’ll keep mine as a “you had to be there” thing!

Setfire will be sponsoring and providing the talks for the North West Ruby User Group (NWRUG) meet on the 20th of August, 2009. The theme of the evening is Capistrano, a technology we use internally to deploy production sites. We also actively support its development. We’ll start with a newbie guide to getting an existing site deploying with cap, and move on to some more advanced recipes.

We’ll then move on to the much more important business of geeky chat and pizza, on us of course, and then, if experience is anything to go by, we’ll be off to a bar!

Interested? Read more and sign up. See you on the 20th.

Today, we announced a new role at Setfire – our first dedicated Technical Project Manager. This is an exciting move for us and is part of our continuing growth; we’re looking for somebody who can keep the machine running smoothly and bring a fresh perspective to our process and techniques.

Do you (or somebody you know) love software development, working with both technical people and clients, and have a keen eye for process? Do you yearn for a laid back environment, free of corporate hassle, where you can get things done as part of a winning team? Then check out the Technical Project Manager job and apply!

Send your covering letter and CV to recruitment@setfiremedia.com today.

Last Thursday we celebrated a year since the launch of Setfire Media. It’s been a great year for Setfire, with some major product launches, new staff and some important projects making big strides forward. We’ve expanded to take over both floors of our office and have the strongest team we’ve ever seen!

We celebrated with a team lunch, quick speech and, of course, a round of ‘Outside Table Football’ (or OTF for short!)

Thanks to our team and our clients for making this a cracking year.

REST or Representational State Transfer development is web development with controller functions geared around the four HTTP request types (or verbs) – POST, GET, PUT and DELETE, equating these (classically but by no means exclusively) to the CRUD operations Create, Read, Update and Delete respctively. Once you start developing in REST the advantages of this quickly become clear:

• Restricting your controller functionality in this way naturally prevents you from building bloated controllers
• It ensures that the layout of your code doesn’t become too obfuscated
• It allows you to make calls without having to specify your controller action explicitly in the request (as you do in a normal HTTP GET request).

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We’re proud to announce that as of today one of our developers, Lee Hambley has taken over maintenance of capify.org. For many people involved in Ruby on Rails development, Capistrano is a vital tool, making the whole process of maintaining production environments that much simpler, by automating and combining many of the more laborious and repetitive tasks involved.

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On the Beach Holidays (www.otbeach.com) have been named the 13th in the list of private equity backed companies with the fastest growing profits.

On the Beach have been a Setfire Media client since they made the move online.  Developing the website on a day-to-day basis, Setfire Media are an integral part of  On the Beach’s success.  See the full Buyout Track 100.

Learning lessons about the importance of UI from the iPhone

Having seen a LOT of buzz over on Twitter and Friendfeed about the forthcoming N97, I feel compelled somewhat to make a point about this subject, especially as everyone seems to be missing the point badly. I should admit now that I haven’t used an N97, but then neither it seems has anyone else apart from Robert Scoble, so I feel as well placed as anyone to comment.

Killer or Filler?

The label ‘iPhone killer’ has become so hackneyed now I’m not sure anyone believes it when it’s applied to a new product, but yet again we see it slapped onto another touch screen wannabe. There’s already a lot of positive hype about this product, which I’m sure will be fairly slick in many ways, Nokia do design some great phones. However, I remain skeptical about the ability of Nokia or Symbian to turn out an OS experience as compelling and slick as the iPhone.
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