A while back I ranting to a coworker about limitations of make and ant. My main complaint about ant was the choice of XML to represent the build script. I felt a reasonable scripting language would give a lot more power. That discussion eventually led to the creation of Rake. But it seems others seem to have similar thoughts. James Duncan...

This is a continuation of the KataTwoVariation1 posting where we are trying different methods of implementing a binary search. In the first version we discussed an iterative approach and using loop invariants. In this second installment we cover the the recursive versions. (see Kata Two for background information) Variation #2: Recursive This is...

My "Invitation to Ruby" presentation is now available in the articles section. See onestepback.org/articles/invitationtoruby/cover.html.

PragDave has put together some programming "practice" exericises that he calls Katas. In Kata number two he suggests writing a binary search function, not once, but five different ways. Now I’ve implemented a binary search several times, but writing it five times in five different ways was intriguing. Here’s my attempt at Variations...

Mock objects are testing objects that stand in for a real object in a unit test. They are used to test the interactions between objects. For example, the other night I was testing some CGI code. To display a page of HTML, my object under test calls a print_template method on an object in the CGI framework I am using. It needs to pass in the...

The writeup on the Test Driven Development workshop we held at the Jan 7, 2003 meeting of the Cincinnati XP Users Group is now online at onestepback.org/articles/tdddemo