rspec users - Feb 2009 - Celerity and Webrat (using them together, Benchmarks, same API?)

hey there,
I''ve been using Cucumber + Webrat for a while. The time has come to
spec Js
and Ajax, so I''ve been playing around with celerity features (with
culerity
until now).

1. How usefull would be to have a common API between Webrat and Celerity?

I found usefull to translate webrat steps painless with:
# step with typical webrat API
When /I follow link (.+)/ do |link|
   visits path_to(link)
end

# turn it into this, in steps/common_celerity.rb
When /I follow link (.+)/ do |link|
   visits path_to(link)
end

# trying to retain a single API Webrat-like when using Celerity
def visits(link)
     @browser.goto(link)
end

2. benchmarking webrat vs celerity and any other.

Also have notice that culerity goes slower than webrat,  are there any
benchmarks about it? (I''ll try to put up some of those later) are you
noticing this also? or is it just me?

actually $ top shows some defunkt java processes but dont know whos
responsible culerity, celerity, jruby or my bad installation :-)

3. Is it posible (I know it is CodeCowboy) to use them both together in same
feature run and say something like:

# in some feature file been able to say cucumber to  use only webrat
:webrat => true
Scenario running this step with webrat should save my time
Given ...

would that be doing the feature "too low level" at the eyes of the
client?
(should the :webrat => true part be moved to some other place?)

if the living together webrat and celerity would pass as valid, then my
latter implementation of the steps in point 1 (and every step run I guess)
would have to make cucumber recognize which of the Webrat::visits or
Celerity::visits (or any other) is to be called

what do you think? does that make sense? I''ll come back with more
later...

cheers,
joaquin
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Joaquin Rivera Padron wrote:
>
> 1. How usefull would be to have a common API between Webrat and Celerity?
Very useful!  In fact someone (Kamal) has already started doing that.  
Check out his work on his webrat fork:
http://github.com/kamal/webrat/tree/1543bc64ecf85054f9a033e1fc7670806886b41e/lib/webrat/celerity
> 2. benchmarking webrat vs celerity and any other.
>
> Also have notice that culerity goes slower than webrat,  are there any 
> benchmarks about it? (I''ll try to put up some of those later) are
you
> noticing this also? or is it just me?
JRuby and HTMLUnit are going to add some overhead, that is for sure.  
Additionally, they are having to make real HTTP requests to a server, 
where as with webrat''s rails mode it uses rail''s integration
session and
is a lot more lightweight.  I would stick to using the :rails mode in 
webrat for as much as you can and then switch to Celerity for the parts 
that need JS,
>
>
> 3. Is it posible (I know it is CodeCowboy) to use them both together 
> in same feature run and say something like:
Yes.  If you want to run them on the feature, and you can make it work 
with your step definitions then webrat provides two helpful methods for 
you to do this:

When /^I do this and that$/ do
  webrat.simulate do
     visit some_path
     # do other non-js stuff
  end
  webrat.automate do
    click_link "Some JS link"
    # do other JS related things
  end
end

So webrat#simulate is only executed in webrat modes that are 
"simulating" a web browser and have no JS-capabilities.  When you are 
automating a browser, like with the Selenium mode in webrat, the 
webrat#automate block is ran but not the webrat#simulate.  I can''t tell
if Kamal has added these to his Celerity session but it would fall into 
the case of #automate (even though it is simulating.. but the fact that 
it is executing JS is the distinguishing part.)

For some features you may only want them to run with a JS solution.  In 
that case I would recommend using Cucumber''s new tagging feature (only 
available in the latest git version) and tag your features that need 
JS.  You can then create some cucumber profiles in cucumber.yml to only 
run your JS and non-JS features independently of one another.

As you can tell, a lot of this stuff is very new.  But what you 
described is the end goal and give it a month or two and it will be 
ready for easy consumption IMO.  As it is now, you may need to help iron 
out some problems with the Celerity webrat session.  The big advantage 
of sticking to the webrat API though is that you can easily swap out the 
different adapters (i.e. selenium) and run your features without 
modifying your step definitions.

HTH,
Ben

hey Ben,
thanks for your answers,
I''ll give kamal work a try and have a look at the points you are
pointing
about webrat.
I''ve been playing with culerity for two days and it does not sound
difficult
to accomplish this we are talking.

But I was talking from the culerity part (haven''t look too much into
webrat). I have already started to bring together the common_celerity.rb
steps that culerity provides with the by webrat provided common steps, in
the end by redefining webrat methods (like visit, etc) I can manage to
retain common steps, but still there''s to do. I''ll have a
closer look to
your points and see. Check out here what I have now:
http://github.com/joahking/culerity/tree/webrat_api

at the moment for cucumber to use culerity to run the steps, I just comment
the webrat initialization in env.rb. But the format.yml is indeed a place to
look,

more on that later,

cheers,
joaquin
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