Approval Tests

I recently listened to a Herding Code podcast on Approval Tests.

The basic idea is that instead of writing:

    assert(x == <some-value>)

instead you write:

    approve(x)

and when you run the test it shows you the result and asks you to "approve" it. Once you've approved a value, the test will pass (without interaction) as long as the result doesn't change.

If the value is something simple like a number, there's not much point. But if the value is a more complex object like an invoice, then it's much simpler to approve the whole thing than to write a lot of asserts.

I can't see it replacing conventional style asserts, but it seems like it could be useful.

Textastic

I was looking for some way to have my Suneido source code on my iPad. More for viewing than to actually write code. I tried a few things, and settled on Textastic.

I was able to retrieve my cSuneido code from the SourceForge Subversion repository, but I didn't manage to get the jSuneido code from Mercurial. (It may just have been really slow. Or maybe it was trying to download the history?) So I just copied my source directory to Dropbox and pulled it from there.

I used it a few times while I was traveling recently and it worked well. For example, I'd get an email from my staff asking what a particular error message meant and I was able to find it in the source code and see where it came from.

Textastic is somewhat compatible with TextMate. I have a copy of TextMate on my Mac but I don't actually use it much since I tend to work in Eclipse.

From my limited use, I'd recommend it. It's not free, but for $10 you can't go too far wrong.