Using RSpec to drive the design of a GUI desktop application

Testing RSpec
1

Hello everybody,
I’ve been using RSpec as a tool to create web applications for some time
now, in Rails, and using plain Ruby with WEBrick as well. The tool suits
my
needs and the story runner is great.
Now there are things that aren’t solvable on the web, you’ll need a
real
desktop application for those problems.

So I’ve toyed a bit around with various GUI libraries as wxRuby and
RubyCocoa, to get a feeling on how these libraries work and I love to
create
native OS X applications using cocoa.
Of course, the next question that arose in my head was:“How do I drive
the
design of an application using a BDD framework like RSpec?”.

When writing a web application, it is relatively easy to simulate a HTTP
request to the app and crawl through the returned HTML, but for a
desktop
application it’s different, right?
The format (html) handled between the application, and the toolkit
drawing
the actual screen isn’t that open for a desktop application as it is for
a
web application.

So, since we don’t want to test the inner workings of the gui toolkit
and we
only want to specify the behaviour of the code we write self, we must
plug a
framework somewhere, to capture the actual calls to this toolkit to know
if
our code is doing the right thing. At least, that’s how I see it
currently.
But how could that be done?

Regards,

Matthijs L.

2

Matthijs L. wrote:

Hello everybody,

I’ve been using RSpec as a tool to create web applications for some time
now, in Rails, and using plain Ruby with WEBrick as well. The tool suits
my needs and the story runner is great.
Now there are things that aren’t solvable on the web, you’ll need a
real desktop application for those problems.

Well … given a large enough monitor and a minimal set of toolbars and
menus on your browser, I’m not convinced there’s much of a difference
between a “desktop” application and a “web” application from the point
of view of a user sitting at a KVM portal. Of course, there is over a
decade of convergence between the two user interfaces, so that’s not a
great surprise. What do you think you couldn’t do with a browser and a
web application framework/database running on the same machine as the
browser and contacted via “localhost”?

3

Well that’s just cumbersome, and actually not the point of my
discussion. I
rather discuss about the ways we could use RSpec to create an
application
based on RubyCocoa (for example), instead of discussing about what types
of
software can’t work on the web, alright?