the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I really need to write down my process of writing tests during development of a new API to share with the rest of the OpenACS community. Like writing the tests themselves, I am sure explaining the process will lead to better understanding of the process, and most likely show room for improvement.

Sometimes, the itention of code is so clear, you don't even need a test, just reading it, you can intuitively understand weakness in the API and work around it. That probably doesn't justify writing a test, because its much easier to reproduce conditions with an automated test than by hand and I haven't met a test I have only run once yet.

Of course, really using the code to get a job done is the best way to learn about it. Writing a test is a quick way to give your code a job to do.

Signifigantly, they approach the material in a little different way, and order than the classic lectures available online http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/

It seems like the lectures given by the authors in 1986 follow the development of the book itself pretty closely. I was getting stuck on one part of the book, and not surprisingly they skip that part and come back to it, in the Berkeley lectures.

The push up first-order functions much earlier in the course, and I was able to "get" it right away. I am sure there is much more to understand, and I will keep listening and learning.

XoWiki has the concept of Page Templates, that can allow differnt types of layout and formatting as well as extra attributes added to an object. This could be used to add new types of pages, such as the book reviews in the bookshelf package used here.

This site is mainly a weblog, and learning history for me, so I really like having a blog-like chronological view of the content and the site. XoWiki includes a blog view, of the recently added pages automatically. This is really handy and fits right into what I wanted to do with the site, but makes it much easier. Now any XoWiki page could replace most of the pages here, and would show up in the blog view, automatically.

Now to find time!