Book Image

RSpec Essentials

By : Mani Tadayon
Book Image

RSpec Essentials

By: Mani Tadayon

Overview of this book

This book will teach you how to use RSpec to write high-value tests for real-world code. We start with the key concepts of the unit and testability, followed by hands-on exploration of key features. From the beginning, we learn how to integrate tests into the overall development process to help create high-quality code, avoiding the dangers of testing for its own sake. We build up sample applications and their corresponding tests step by step, from simple beginnings to more sophisticated versions that include databases and external web services. We devote three chapters to web applications with rich JavaScript user interfaces, building one from the ground up using behavior-driven development (BDD) and test-driven development (TDD). The code examples are detailed enough to be realistic while simple enough to be easily understood. Testing concepts, development methodologies, and engineering tradeoffs are discussed in detail as they arise. This approach is designed to foster the reader’s ability to make well-informed decisions on their own.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
RSpec Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The importance of external web services


It is increasingly common for software to rely on external web services. These can be from a third party, such as the openweathermap.org API we saw in Chapter 4, Setting Up and Cleaning Up. However, we are likely to also interact with web services from within our own organization, or those that we have written ourselves. Not only do web services allow us to access external tools, such as weather info from openweathermap.org, they are also a popular approach to architecting applications within an organization. It is safe to say that an HTTP API is the default approach to exposing a service over a network today.

Dealing with external web services in tests can be challenging. By definition, these services are external, so we don't have as much, or any, control over how they behave, or how much support they offer for testing. As we saw in Chapter 4, Setting Up and Cleaning Up, we should try to avoid these external services in most tests, so we need to mock...