Test driving Catalyst/DBIx::Class development: Introduction

Right now, I’m really big on test driven development. However, I always found it difficult to really apply TDD to my work – my work is not isolated enough to be easily approachable, not to mention I normally make use of a ton of modules that weren’t always designed with the test driven developer in mind. To push myself to learn more about overcoming these challenges, I decided to start work on a hobby project and be as religiously test driven as possible. And as if that wasn’t useful enough, I thought I’d share it all with you in blog form!

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So, an introduction about the project and motivation first. My text editor of choice is Emacs – it’s hugely extendable with vast amounts of user contributed scripts and plenty of new things to learn about. However, these scripts and this knowledge is very loosely distributed. The best resource at the moment is the Emacs Wiki project, but I have a general distaste for wikis as a main source of information. Contrast this with Vim (a similarly well-extended text editor) and the homepage itself has a repository of scripts and tips.

I’ve decided to start a site my self – M-x customize. M-x customize will hold a repository of scripts and tips, and present them in a structured manor with searching, reviews and ratings. Hopefully in the long run I’ll actually integrate a package manager such as ELPA (I’ve contacted the author, but yet to get a reply).

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A quick word on technology… because if you’re like me… the cooler the tech the more likely I am to read the blog posts! We’re going to be using Test::Mock – a mocking framework I’m working on in parallel with this project, Catalyst & Moose (of course), and templating with HTML::Zoom.

Next article we’ll get started with finishing the first user story for viewing scripts. Hold tight and watch this space!