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After porting Haberdasher to Rails 2, I had forgotten to execute all the testsuites I had (unit, functional and acceptance, with Selenium and Selenium on Rails). The bad news is that they didn’t pass. The good news is that it wasn’t such a big problem making them pass again.

The functional tests failed because of some stupid change in Rails 2. Namely, it seems that now you can’t make more than one request in a single functional test method (bug?). The acceptance tests had some minor problems due to some changes I made in the interface. The rest worked without problems.

Now that everything is ported and working like a charm, it’s time to make some interesting changes. I had been wanting to use a really cool library called RemixUI, made by my former company, Fotón Sistemas Inteligentes, and these days I finally had the chance to use the latest version. RemixUI is a “web widget” library, similar to DJWidgets, MCWidgets and RemixWidgets (all of them available in the Fotón BerliOS page, but unfortunately obsolete), that makes it much easier to write validation, integration between client side and server side, interface improvements with Javascript, reusable widgets/controls, etc.

I haven’t used it that much yet, but I’m really eager to change all the forms and controls in the application to take advantage of the cool stuff offered by RemixUI. The problem now is that the RemixUI gem is not public yet, so I can’t really release the new version of Haberdasher. I’ll try to make them put the Gem somewhere public, so I can release Haberdasher, and other people can have a look at RemixUI.

I’m kind of back to Haberdasher work, so I’m playing again with Rails. However, I’m a very late adopter for many things, and that included Rails because I wasn’t that interested in investing time in learning all the new stuff and porting my applications to the new version.

But the universe had its own ideas about Rails 2.0 and me, so I had some retarded compatibility problems with Haberdasher and the up-to-date rake utility version in Debian. The problems were related to some Rails plugins I was using, and they made me have a look at upgrading to Rails 2.0 from Rails 1.2. It turned out to be really easy to do, the hardest by far was replacing the plugins that gave problems with application code or other plugins (yes, I know that if I was going to get rid of them anyway, I might as well have stayed in Rails 1.2, I just thought it was a good idea to upgrade if I was going to resume Haberdasher development).

To be honest I haven’t really learned new stuff yet. I’m just using the same things I was using, only now powered by Rails 2.0. A couple of improvements/clean ups in syntax, deprecated code removal and similar, but nothing big yet.

The other news is that now that I have a working Haberdasher again, I’m making some changes I had in mind since months ago, namely adding some user preferences “framework”, and adding the ability to assign a copyright notice to the patches (with a configurable default notice per user, hence the user preferences). I haven’t published this work yet, but I plan to do it in a couple of days, after updating the demo installation and checking that everything’s alright.