Jeremy S Walworth

Yes, this is a dev post, no, it is not a post about my personal life. I'm happily married to only one woman. ;-)

Now that I've clarified that. If you've ever looked at HairForecast.com, you'll note that I have some graphics that depict the weather, and there's a different girl in each graphic. The girls wear coats when it's cold, they have umbrellas when it rains, their hair is blown around when it's windy, etc. You'll also note that I have 3 different girls that I rotate. I wanted to have the girls appear in random order, but never have the same girl appear twice (on the same forecast day).

Robby, one of the developers I worked along side at BlueSpire, used a pattern in our test suite to simplify the setup of objects under test. I thought it very useful and it made the code so much more readable.

The idea is, when setting up an object n different ways, it's nice to set only the parameters you need on the same line as the instantiation.

I first learned about method_missing when Christopher Bennage asked me about it. Even after looking it up and explaining it to Christopher, I didn't find any practical use for it in the things I was doing.

At least until tonight, that is.

I've been working on expanding Hair Forecast into Canada. I have the Canadian weather data described in active record like so:

    create_table :canadaforecasts do |t|
      t.column :fcstdate, :date
      t.column :lat, :float
      t.column :lon, :float
    end

I'm creating a very simple site (4 static pages) for some friends and didn't need to do anything fancy (yet), so I elected to use plain HTML and Javascript and not use a framework (like Rails). I like Rails, but I just can't see myself deploying the whole Rails tree just for a 4 page static site.

Sometimes I find myself in need of a quick and dirty HTTP server when I'm working in plain HTML with a little Javascript. For example: when I'm building banner ads that use scriptaculous. Rather than mess with lighttpd and get the files where it can see them, I found myself wanting to the do the old "ruby script/server" as we do in Rails.

So I looked at the Webrick home page, and ended up with this:

require 'webrick'
include WEBrick
s = HTTPServer.new(
 :Port => 3000,
 :DocumentRoot => Dir::pwd
)
trap("INT"){ s.shutdown }
s.start