Re: Re: JRuby on Rails

This is certainly an acquired talent I can't say I've mastered yet.
Digging down into any Ruby application can be a daunting task; with
Rails, daunting doesn't do it justice. Rails code not only mutilates
itself in various execution scenarios, it mutilates core Ruby
functions with its own enhanced versions. Discovering where someting's
failing becomes an excercise in pain.

However, it does get easier with time. The stack dumps in JRuby are
better now than they used to be and usually reflect where a problem
actually happened. One can also quickly learn the key spots in the
code to set breakpoints for specific sorts of failures; running
script/generate in debug mode allowed me to pinpoint several failures
deep, deep within Rails. And of course, knowledge of Rails code is a
huge help...I'm sure in the course of getting this working we'll learn
more about Rails than any of us ever wanted to. I know I've seen
things noone should have to see, and we're just at the beginning of
this adventure.

On 2/22/06, David Corbin <dcorbin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Running the RoR tests is not a bad idea, but the problem is (I think) that
> their "unit-tests" excercise hundreds of RoR methods (not to mention all the
> core and stdlib things).   This is probably a quick way easy way to find
> failures, but we still need to find out WHY it's failing.  In the Rails code
> this is a LOT harder than in some other code.
>
> In a recent problem we ran across (not RoR related), there was one regex deep
> inside REXML that was causing problems.  I had a very reliable test that
> failed, but until we REALLY narrow the amount of Ruby code being
> interpretted, we can't really fix it.
>

--
Charles Oliver Nutter @ headius.blogspot.com
JRuby Developer @ jruby.sourceforge.net
Application Architect @ www.ventera.com


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