For some of you, this might be a blessing in disguise, but I've been patiently delaying my website development in lieu of the new Rails 1.1.x release. Why a blessing? Well, considering I'm constantly seeking feedback on the site when I have my development cape on, it's probably a relaxing break from having to hear me ask, 'What do you think of this?'...'How about that, should I change the color?'....so on an so forth.

Rails 1.1.x is a big release for Ruby on Rails developers. One of my favorite features I'm looking forward to abusing is the integration testing. Integration testing allows you to create tests that span multiple controllers and actions. Prior to this feature, you were not easily able to test multiple controllers and actions.

How will I be using it? Well, I have a number of controllers (e.g., login, blog, register) and plenty of actions in each controller. For instance, take the case of simulating a click on the 'Add Blog' button above. A user must be logged in to add a blog, if they are not logged in, they need to be re-directed to the login page. After successfully logging in, they then need to be re-directed back to the 'Add Blog' page. So with integration testing, I can confirm that the controllers and actions all work as desired via automated testing.

I've been actively tracking Gentoo's changelogs for the Rails project, but they still haven't moved Rails 1.1.x into stable yet. I realize I could do a gem install rails --include-dependencies, but I decided to be patient and use the Gentoo portage package for the time being...but they better hurry up, I want to get developing again.