On Mar 18, 2010, at 10:38 pm, doug livesey wrote:
> Right, so I'm worrying about, at best, fractions of pence sterling for data
> transfer, which is probably less of a saving than saying "sod it" to the
> issue & spending dev time on something rather more profitable?
Hi Doug
The real cost is likely to be not the S3 fees but the time it takes to run your
features. Every time you have to fetch off to a remote server adds just a
little bit to the run time. Enough of these means you need to wait longer than
necessary, which slows down feedback; a lot of these means it might take so
long you don't run the features often enough. It depends how many affected
scenarios there are, how much S3 slows it down etc etc...
What I usually do to get round it is to make the web service a configurable
parameter, and write a *tiny* mock service to run locally. Here is an example
I wrote with a client to test integration with Postmark[1]:
# run very flat apps with merb -I <app file>.
Merb::Router.prepare do
match("/email/", :method => :get).to(:controller => "postmark", :action =>
"index")
match("/email/", :method => :post).to(:controller => "postmark", :action =>
"send_email")
end
class Postmark < Merb::Controller
provides :json
@@email = nil
def index
@@email.to_json
end
def send_email
@@email = request.params
""
end
end
You need to write a bit of wrapper code to get the JSON back out, but that
gives you a Ruby hash inside Cucumber. It's then really easy to check that the
correct parameters got posted. Note that this still has the inherent issue
with all mocks: that because we don't own the Postmark API, it could change
under us. So we need some process to prevent that breaking our app. Currently
the tradeoff is that paying attention for email announcements of API changes is
less expensive than the delay incurred by running Cucumber features against a
remote API.
HTH. This is just what I do in the situations I encounter. As always, YMMV -
and it will if your situation is different.
Ash
[1] http://postmarkapp.com/
--
http://www.patchspace.co.uk/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleymoran
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