More work on widgets

As I had mentioned, I had been working on Opera widgets. Some time ago I had seen a great Javascript plotting library for jQuery called flot, and I really wanted to try it out in some “real world” project. As I was working on the World Loanmeter widget, which incidentally uses jQuery too, it was very easy to figure out some way to use flot for something useful: I decided to add some simple graphs to the widget.

The initial idea of the loanmeter widget was to show where in the world Kiva was offering loans. However, as I used the widget myself, I realised that the location in the world was less important for me, and I was more interested in knowing what the person was going to use the money for. So, I added some options to filter by “sector” and I figured that having some graphs comparing how much money was requested and already funded, for each sector, would be a very quick and visual way to get the information I wanted. I started playing with flot, and I have to say that except for a couple of relatively minor problems, it was quite easy to use. I don’t have screenshots showing the graphs, but feel free to try the widget itself and have a look (hint: you have two buttons at the bottom right corner to switch between “map view” and “graph view”).

The other widget I have been working on is a monitor widget for projects in CruiseControl.rb (a really simple and neat continuous integration server we use at Opera). More than one year ago, my colleague Nico had written a very quick & dirty widget for monitoring the result of the test runs of the My Opera functional testsuite. There were a couple of things I wanted to change, and I also wanted to monitor other projects, so I figured that I’d rewrite the widget to have a more maintainable codebase and then make it generic, so you could configure which CC.rb installation and which project to monitor. I’m moderately happy with the result of the refactoring, and happy enough with the final result. I know it has several issues, and I expect that once anyone outside our team starts using it, there will be things to improve and fix :-) If you use CruiseControl.rb, give it a try!

• continuous
• cruisecontrol.rb
• integration
• kiva
• loanmeter
• opera
• projects
• widgets

Work-related news

Some time ago, Opera announced the Opera Web Standards Curriculum project. It’s a very interesting collection of articles that can be used as “curriculum” to learn about web development. It gets extra geeks points for using a Creative Commons license for the articles themselves. Even the W3C mentioned it :-) I just found some time to have a look at it, that’s why I’m posting now :-)

The other news is that finally the Opera QA blog is online, and has the first non-hello-world-article (written by yours truly), “Continuous Integration: Team Testing”. I’m very excited about this, because it’s the first time I’ll participate directly in a company blog, and because the IT world needs more (and better) QA, so hopefully we’ll be able to spread the word and make the world a better place :-D

• blog
• continuous
• curriculum
• development
• integration
• opera
• qa
• standards
• web

CruiseControl.rb

As part of my QA work on several projects, months ago I was looking for a continuous integration server. I looked at several, but most of them seemed really scary judging from the documentation. I finally went for CruiseControl.rb, and I have been really happy with it all this time. It’s a really nice, very simple continuous integration server written in Rails. I had it up and running before I even understood how to install the others I looked.

Even though is a really cool piece of software, I was missing some better test result reporting. It was actually there, but only for Rails projects, and unfortunately we don’t have any Rails (or Ruby, for that matter) projects at work. So, I just had a look at the sources to see if I could hook my own reporting there, and the code turned out to be impressively easy to understand (especially taking into account that it’s a rather non-standard Rails application, as it has builders running as daemons, it doesn’t really use a database, etc).

The result is a patch for CC.rb, already submitted to their BTS, that adds a plugin-based result reporting, that can be extended to understand any kind of testsuite. It’s basically a parser that collects all the test passes and test failures from the testsuite output log.

Also, the other day I had another need, which was even easier to make because it could be implemented as a simple CC.rb notification plugin. It depends on the above patch, and it collects all the bugs in the current build, searches in the history of the project, finds out who made the commits that produced the regressions, and bugs all those people by e-mail, pointing out which failures were supposedly made by them, and which build they started failing (so it’s easier to locate the offending code).

It’s not perfect, and it cannot be, but it’s a nice addition to continuous integration. This notification plugin is not public yet, but it might be in the future (especially if they accept my patch as part of upstream), so stay tuned if you’re interested.

• cc.rb
• ci
• continuous
• cruisecontrol
• integration
• patches
• rails