Trick for manually testing Ruby On Rails applications via command line

Programming veteran Mike Clark, of Clarkware Consulting has turned his attention from Java to Ruby On Rails.

This month he blogged a lot about Rails, including a very neat tip for how to run Ruby On Rails 1.1 in a headless mode and manually feed it commands simulating user requests, and then seeing what comes out.

Mike Clark's Weblog:

If you've ever wanted to poke and prod your Rails app through the
entire stack without firing up a web browser, Rails 1.1 just made it
easy. You can now use the app object from within
script/console to get access to the ActionController::Integration::Session
instance. And that means you can drive your app just like an
integration test.

Mike created quite a lot of extremely useful free software tools in Java over the years. I am sure his impact on Ruby On Rails will be just as dramatic and beneficial to everyone. The fact he is writing about it is just icing on the cake.

Technorati tags: rubyonrails, testing