---
title: Suspenders now with RSpec, jQuery, and more
teaser:
tags: news,web,suspenders,open source
author: Harold Giménez
published_on: 2010-07-13
---

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](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/post/701863189/shoulda-rails3-and-beyond), 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](http://jqtouch.com/). 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](http://rubygems.org/gems/suspenders) is the preferred way of
installing and using suspenders, we have added these as rubygem dependencies on
[our
gemspec](http://github.com/thoughtbot/suspenders/commit/f7655644330a7363bec04e0718f303d936ffcbb1).

### Testing suspenders

The [creation of
suspenders-gem](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/post/607129437/suspenders-as-a-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](http://github.com/thoughtbot/suspenders/blob/master/features/rake_clean.feature)
that verify that the suspenders project starts in a clean state.

### Take her for a ride

![Suspenders ride](http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/08/misuse-of-hydraulics.jpg)

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