DVD Catalog Handler and Other Stuff.
My general strategy with this project (in order of priority) was to:
- Spend some time learning about the rails framework. You notice commit churn as I did this.
- Use cucumber and FactoryGirl to build tests before (or during) feature development. I did not do any UI related JS testing, and I didn't muck with the controller tests automatically created.
- Complete as many of the requirements and optional use cases as possible.
- Implement a killer UI (I never got to this one...as you'll see)
Given those priorities, I focused the majority of my efforts on test coverage as opposed to the UI. You'll notice the UI is simple (at best), but I believe I have 100% use case coverage (didn't have time to wire up code coverage tools) with a few exceptions below.
It is also worth pointing out that I used RubyMine for this. All of the project files are checked in. My rails command line skills couldn't keep pace...yet.
- Searching by age range for actors/directors. Just ran out of time given the deadline. Search was the last thing I did, and isn't cleaned up like I wanted it to be. For example, the controller code to handle search could be generic and in a helper... but is isn't.
- Ability to add actors/directors not already present while creating a dvd. I chose not to do this one because I see it as purely a UI task (and I didn't focus on the UI). The underlying API should strictly deal with resources and not create side effects (good or bad) like automatically adding actors/directors. In other words, that is an orchestration challenge the UI (or curl, etc.) can deal with.
- Rails blows away python/django. Was very impressed with the amount of effort put into generators, etc. Very easy/efficient to use.
- You'll notice varying degrees of proper tests. Took me a bit to get the feel of cucumber, and I didn't have time to go back and refactor the early tests. In addition, I am sure there are better ways to validate results that one picks up over time. I also went back and forth on how generic/specific to make the test steps. Seems like an interesting topic.