Partying With Web Standards - in Los Angeles

We’re still sweeping up the confetti, and emptying the ashtrays after the last visitor left the party.  We still have some awards to give out, and a few books to give away.  Meanwhile, Andy Clark says  Taylor Swift is still recovering from the after party hangover, and Max Weir is trying to figure out if the CSS Squirrel is a nut case.

This year, I made a video to help promote it.

Thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

3rd Annual Blue Beanie Day

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie (or Blue Toque in Canada) and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2009/ .

It’s easy to participate:

1. Make a personal commitment to fight Web Standards apathy. Show solidarity with the Standardistas on Monday, November 30th, 2009.
2. Buy, beg, or borrow a Blue Beanie (blue hat or cap, even a black or grey one will do in a pinch.)
3. Take a photo of yourself wearing the Blue Beanie. Or take a cool group photo of you and your friends wearing Blue Beanies.
4. Post your photo, or photos to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and other social networks on Monday, November 30th, 2009. Remember to switch your Facebook profile photo that day, too!
5. Start by inviting all your friends to the Facebook Event for Blue Beanie Day 2009.
6. Promote Blue Beanie Day on your blog, wiki, facebook page, twitter tweets — telling all your friends to get ready for Blue Beanie Day. 

• 960 Grid System – A mature and stable CSS Framework, that uses a fixed width page layout of 960 pixels, along with the flexibility of  12 or 16 columns.  (Created by Nathan Smith of  SonSpring)
• Blueprint – An elegant and complete CSS Framework that includes a CSS reset (similar to Eric Meyer’s Reset) that eliminates deals with the discrepancies across browsers, a solid grid that can support most complex layouts (without reverting to crazy HTML table-based design patterns), expert typographical principles, CSS form styles for great looking user interfaces, and CSS print styles for making any webpage ready for printing out on paper. (Created and maintained by Christian Montoya and the Blueprint community.)
• The Golden Grid – A simple CSS Framework for HTML web page design, by Vladimir Carrer from Italy

Here’s a listing of the major components that are included in this FOSS (Free Open Source Software) stack.

• Ruby 1.8.7
• Ruby 1.9.1
• RubyGems 1.3.4
• Rails 2.3.2
• ImageMagick 6.5.2-9
• Subversion 1.6.2
• SQLite 3.5.1
• MySQL 5.1.30
• Apache 2.2.11
• PHP 5.2.8
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.4
• Git 1.6.3.1
• Nginx 0.7.59

Lot’s of great choices and options make this “a very powerfull stack.”  Bitnami’s latest RubyStack (RubyStack 1.5-2) goes above and beyond to give you a full Ruby environment (for the two latest stable releases of Ruby), a PHP environment, two SQL database servers, two web servers, and two version control services. Wow! All that, and it only takes a few minutes to configure and install.

I’ll be using the Bitnami stack (with Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1) as a test environment while working on the Ruby and Rails book reviews I mentioned yesterday.

Here’s a brief summary of some tasty new treats in the Ruby lineup:

1. Learning Rails (Rails from the Outside In) by Simon St. Laurent and Edd Dumbill, published by O’Reilly Media (See Learning Rails book cover and O’Reilly catalog description here.)
2. Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts (Useful Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems) by Steve Pugh, published by No Starch Press (the Finest in Geek Entertainment). You can download a PDF of chapter 1, “General Purpose Utilities”.
3. Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails by Maik Schmidt, published by Pragmatic Programmers
4. Programming Ruby 1.9 (The newly updated Pragmatic Programmers Guide, aka the Pick-Axe book), by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt, published by The Pragmatic Programmers
5. Agile Web Development With Rails (Third Edition) by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Justin Gehtland, James Duncan Davidson, and Andreas Schwarz

I hope you are enjoying your summer reading as much as I am.  What new books are you reading?

How to combine SEO, blogging, and social media for powerful marketing results.

JumpBox

Tempe, Ariz.  (Press Release) ~ December 17, 2008 — JumpBox, publisher of virtual appliances which provide the easiest way to trial, develop, and deploy applications, today announced the release of 38 Open Source applications to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The release enables server application deployment, configuration, and management almost completely independent of any user hardware.

Organizations have long sought to empower themselves with software that enhances productivity,” says Kimbro Staken, CEO, JumpBox. “JumpBox now offers the ability to do so without procuring hardware, or downloading any software at all.”

JumpBox offers small to mid-sized organizations a library of Open Source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service.  Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for twelve JumpBox applications, including Ruby on Rails, Drupal, SugarCRM and more have been made available for free. AMIs for the full suite of 38 applications are available to plus and premium subscribers to JumpBox Open.

“The combination of JumpBox and EC2 signals a new era of agility and flexibility for virtualized organizations,” says Staken. “Imagine enabling better customer service almost instantly with SugarCRM or deploying a Ruby on Rails application for testing in minutes. EC2 provides cost effective, scalable computing power; JumpBox provides the application packaged for instant deployment.”

A JumpBox packages an application’s software, dependencies, and application data into a single virtual application that deploys in minutes locally, or hosted to major computing, virtualization, and cloud computing platforms. Among other enhanced features, a JumpBox provides an intuitive user interface to quickly guide users through deployment, a web-based control panel for simplified management of system functions, and a backup system that enables data security and portability.

For more information, visit JumpBox on the web at http://www.jumpbox.com

All brands, product names, company names, trademarks and service marks are the properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

JumpBox Media Contact:
Steven Shaffer
JumpBox, Inc.
http://www.jumpbox.com
480.967.5897

All software should be rigorously tested, during the development process, and before it is released. Automated testing helps software developers, testing teams and quality control (QC) teams perform comprehensive and effective testing, and find bugs quickly. This new book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf (in the Facets of Ruby Series) documents and demonstrates how to use the Ruby scripting language to test user interfaces reliably and repeatedly. The book covers a wide scope of testing needs, including techniques for scripted testing of MS-Windows GUIs, Java platform GUIs (for Linux, Mac, Windows, and others), or for web applications.

Book cover - Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby

This book is a practical, quick moving tutorial based on real life, and real-world GUI applications.  Author Ian Dees says, “This is the book I wish I had four years ago. That’s when I faced the equally unpleasant task of fixing old, broken GUI tests and coaxing a rickety third-party toolkit into running new tests. I started looking for a how-to guide on GUI testing to help me down this road. Unfortunately, there were none.”  So Ian wrote the book he was wishing for.

Mr. Dees points out in the introduction (p.4) that many developers and software professionals have been suspicious or skeptical about test driven development (TDD). However, as he points out, “the important idea in TDD wasn’t the tests; it was the fact that writing the tests forces developers to think through how their code will behave.” After TDD, some people shifted their thought process, and began to speak of “behavior driven development” (BDD).  As it turns out, Ruby is a very powerful and expressive language for scripting tests, and RSpec is a special Ruby tool in the Ruby coders toolbox. “RSpec was the first Ruby implementation of the ideas behind BDD.”

Many examples and test scripts are sprinkled throughout the book.

Chapter 2 covers some simple examples with MS-Windows, and Java Swing (the original Sun Java GUI widgets) with JRuby and lays a nice foundation for the variety of tests that can be performed with Ruby.

Chapter 3 provides more in depth coverage of how to use RSpec, which is a Ruby gem (or library), that turns Ruby into a powerful (yet simple) test description language. RSpec notation uses words like “describe” – for describing the test, and “should” – a verb for describing how if the test passes or fails.

Chapter 4 provides details on how to simplify your testing, and Chapter 5 provides many examples for special cases like testing passwords, wrangling documents, cutting and pasting, or searching and replacing  (all under Ruby script control) to exercise many different tests of your application.

Chapter 6 and 7 provide more details about testing many kinds of apps, testing your tests, testing keystrokes, menus, mouse-clicks, and how to introduce randomness into the testing scenario.  Chapter 8 delves into using FIT (Ward Cunningham’s Framework for Integrated Testing). Fortunately, there is a Ruby gem for FIT testing also, and Mr. Dees demonstrates how easy it is to utilize simple HTML tables to visualize your testing.

Chapter 9 moves into testing web applications by impersonating a browser, parsing the HTML, or driving the actual browser to perform specific behaviors. There are several great pointers and examples on how to use Selenium, and Selenium with RSpec, and example scenarios with AJAX also (going way beyond the simple HTML page load tests). Another great Ruby browser/web-site testing tool called Watir (Web Application Testing in Ruby) is also described. This is a great chapter. The testing techniques in chapter 9 are worth the price of the book, so if you buy the book, and only read chapter 9, you will be receiving great value.

The book has several more chapters describing RSpec Story Runner, specialized testing on the MAC, and alternate GUI testing for the MS-Windows platform, with Win32::GuiTest. The book concludes with a bibliography, nice summary of resources, and helpful websites related to Ruby and software testing, and an index of contents in the book.

Bonus: Rails Podcasts has an MP3 you can download – an interview with author Ian Dees about Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby.

Students in the Web Application Design and Development course at Bryn Mawr College wear blue beanies in support of Web Standards!

This photo is one of many from the 2008 Blue Beanie Day collection at Flickr.

You can read more about the history and purpose of Blue Beanie Day 2008 here on vvn.net, Jeffrey Zeldman’s recent post about Blue Beanie Day, or Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Read-Write-Web news article about Blue Beanie Day 2008 and web standards.