Suspenders is a Rails project template used as a base app for all of our client work. It has gone through a few changes that better reflect our development stack and also allow us to test changes to suspenders itself.
RSpec
As you may know, we are spec'ing our apps with RSpec along with shoulda matchers now. This along with cucumber for integration tests is the testing stack that we’ve been using for a while. RSpec replaces Test::Unit in suspenders.
jQuery
For our front-end behavior we’re using jQuery. The ecosystem around jQuery Core, jQuery UI, and the slew of third-party plugins help bring life to our applications. Using jQuery also gives us an easy transition for mobile web app development with tools like jQTouch. jQuery replaces prototype/scriptaculous in suspenders.
Dependencies
Our projects depend on a number of gems. Some have native extensions and therefore cannot be vendored in the project - I’m talking about our friends nokogiri and RedCloth. In the past we would check if the gems where installed, and installed them if they weren’t. Now that suspenders-gem is the preferred way of installing and using suspenders, we have added these as rubygem dependencies on our gemspec.
Testing suspenders
The creation of suspenders-gem affords us the opportunity to write integration tests for suspenders. In the past, testing updates to suspenders was a manual process because of the nature of the template. But from now on we can write cucumber scenarios that verify that the suspenders project starts in a clean state.
Take her for a ride
Along with these major changes, versions of all other dependencies were bumped to the latest stable versions. Take suspenders for a ride and let us know what you think:
gem install suspenders
suspenders create billion_dollar_idea