I’ve not had the opportunity to use full BDD testing in my day job for some time, in fact probably never – my last foray into testing was probably JUnit in my Java days… so I know it’s about time I got up to speed with it.

Like CouchDB, I saw a great presentation at Scotland on Rails, entitled Working Outside-in with Cucumber and RSpec (link is direct to mp4 file), that showed me that Cucumber was not as hard to learn as first thought and not as confusing as some of the RSpec screencasts I saw via PeepCode.

Here is a very basic example, of simple Cucumber syntax:

  Scenario: Learning to use Cucumber
    Given that I do not know that much about "Cucumber"
    And I have not used "Behaviour Driven Development" really in anger before
    When I start "My Chain"
    Then I should see improvement
    When I start to blog about it

So now my chain has all it’s components ready: Sinatra, CouchDB and Cucumber – and is ready to start!

Image courtesy of viZZZual.com

I knew a little about this previously, and then I saw a presentation at Scotland on Rails which made my mind up about whether it would be suitable for what I was doing or not – it definitely is and therefore was my final choice.

There are plenty of gem options available for Ruby talking to CouchDB, I tried a couple but settled on CouchRest because it didn’t try to be ActiveRecord, and forced me to use more Ruby – which is obviously what I’m trying to do as part of this plan!

These are some links to tools, presentations or general information I have used in making this choice:

The one-click CouchDB package for the Mac
CouchDB: Perform like a pr0n star
The case of ActiveRecord vs. CouchDB
CouchDB introduction PDF
CouchDB and Me
CouchDB website
CouchDB: The Definitive Guide
CouchDB: Thinking beyond the RDBMS
Exploring CouchDB
Futuretalk: CouchDB
Apache CouchDB Project Wiki

Image from CouchDB website

Another reason for using Sinatra, was to deploy application on Google App Engine via JRuby and it was during this, that I decided that Sinatra wasn’t just for small applications and I could rewrite my Scottish Football Archive site using it.

I’m hoping using my blog, I can introduce some in depth articles about Sinatra as I explain my conversion from Rails, but Sinatra really is as simple as the following, just to get you up and started:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
  "Hello, World!"
end

Here are some links for further information:

Sinatra website
Sinatra on Github
Sinatra: 29 Links and Resources For A Quicker, Easier Way to Build Webapps
Classy Web Development with Sinatra

Image courtesy of Lewy

I’ve been reading Chris’ posts about converting his site from Rails to something running on CouchDB for a while now, without realising this is exactly what I want to do too.

Over the past few months, I’ve been getting to grips with Sinatra, mainly to improve my Ruby skills but also just to get me coding again, as my day job at the BBC isn’t as a developer anymore.

While attending the North West Ruby User Group, I’ve also got more to grips with Cucumber and the whole Behaviour Driven Development thing but have yet to put this into full practice.

Therefore, I’m starting “My Chain” in effect, and I’m going to blog about my experiences while I convert my existing Ruby on Rails site, the Scottish Football Archive, to Sinatra, using CouchDB and having it fully tested with Cucumber.

Seems like a lot to do, but that’s hopefully the point…

Image courtesy of Max Klingensmith