Since the day we started upstream testing was our obsession. When we began all we had was the Rails built-in unit, functional and integration tests. When we learned about RSpec the world became a brighter place. When the RSpec team released their StoryRunner we were thrilled. We started writing stories in English and were able to run them. Whoa. It soon turned out the first version had some serious issues with staying DRY. More versions were released, we rewrote our stories, step by step StoryRunner got better and we got better, too.

Then Cucumber came out and it was a huge leap ahead again. With the integration of Webrat we could write much shorter stories, but more importantly we could test that our links and forms were working as well. Everything was working perfectly and the world was a happy place – as long as we didn’t use any JavaScript/AJAX…

Welcome to Culerity. Culerity is a small gem that integrates Cucumber with Celerity, a wrapper around HtmlUnit which in turn is a Java library that parses HTML and runs the embedded JavaScript code. And unlike Watir or Selenium this all happens in headless mode: without hijacking your browser.

The problem with Celerity has been that it only works in a JRuby environment, which means you either had to run your application in JRuby as well (which might not even work with certain libraries and plugins) or somehow work your way around it by running your tests in JRuby and your application in whatever Ruby you wanted to use and somehow glue it together. Culerity now fills this gap. After installing it you run your Cucumber features as usual. Celerity now spawns a Java process in the background, sends all the Celerity calls to this process and evaluates the results back in the original Ruby environment — everything works (almost) as if you were running just in your single Ruby process. For an easier start Culerity comes with the same set of Cucumber step definitions that are provided by a default Cucumber/Webrat installation. This means you can reuse your step definitions written for Webrat.

To get started you can either clone the GitHub repository or simply install the gem (langalex-culerity). Then follow the instructions in the README. If you find something is not working for you or could be improved please feel free to fork the source code and show it some love. The codebase is really small right now and fully spec’d.

—

Does your company need help with software testing? We can help: check out our new product Scene Investigation.

Hey a new meme, gotta be part of it. We got tagged by Jan and Till about “seven things”

These are the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post — some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

So here we go:

Our old Logo

1. The name upstream was suggested by friend. After having spent months in search for a company name we just accepted it out of desperation. Wasn’t such a bad choice was it?
2. When seeing our old logo most people told us it looked like a tennis ball (it was supposed to be a river) – so good we did an overhaul last year.
3. We never ever hire anyone permanently – everyone who works for us is a freelancer. We don’t want anyone to be dependent on us and we don’t want to be responsible for anyone.
4. we pair program all the fucking time (ppatft) .. mostly
5. If my GTD tool wouldn’t remind me every week our office plants would have died long ago
6. We have hired programmers and scored gigs over twitter.
7. We can write PHP but don’t tell anyone.

I’m tagging Mathias, Gregor, Martin, Marius, Pat, Kristina and Christian.

We went to Maine — well, close. To evaluate the past year and make plans for 2009, the Upstream crew recently spent a weekend together. We stayed in a holiday home right on the North Sea coast where we enjoyed the frosty weather and a cosy fireplace. Everyone brought about three cameras on average. This resulted in heaps of pictures with “naturey crap” (the amateur is speaking). See by yourself on Flickr, Tumblr and KommtMit.

Our CEOs Alex and Thilo gave a presention about Upstream’s past year. Then, our aim was to outline what Upstream should do in 2009 and how each of us wants to get involved: How much we want to work and for how much, which technologies we want to learn, does it make more sense to attend conferences or to get involved in various open source projects … we collected our ideas and discussed some of them further.

Next to talking business, we wanted to get to know each other better, so everyone had also prepared a presentation about a non-technical topic of interest:

• Alex introduced us to Sailing, “the most expensive way of travelling inconveniently”.
• Matthias talked about Photography, what else!
• Katrin gave a talk about how to recycle old consumer items by turning them into furniture, showing examples from ecoble, WebUrbanist and Lockengeloet, Hamburg.
• Thilo shared his Pen and Paper Roleplaying Game experiences by reading from his hero’s diary.
• Frank talked about Screamo, his favorite kind of Hardcore/Punk Music, with many sound snippets!
• I presented Rhythms of Resistance, a network of political samba activists.

After all those fun sessions and walking around at the beach taking pictures of every grain of sand it wasn’t so easy to get back to work but we managed —
As a first result we are today relaunching the upstream website presenting our new software development/consulting products: Lift Off, Scene Investigation and Turbo Boost. More on this in another blog post.

For further reading about our weekend see what Mathias wrote.

We’ll be hosting another of our Cockpit Nights. This time instead of listening to talks we’ll be watching Screencasts. Wednesday Jan 21st is Erlang, Thursday 22nd is Objective-C day. More details in our public wiki.

update: Screencasts courtesy of The Pragmatic Programmers. We thank them very much for providing them. Check out their whole series of screencasts at http://pragmatic.tv.

Want to stay up to date on events? Follow @upstream_agile on Twitter or subscribe to the iCal Feed.

Scotland on Rails will take place On March 26-28 2009 in Edinburgh. The organizers have just published the list of speakers. Pretty nice lineup including Jim Weirich, Yehuda Katz, Pat Maddox, Chad Fowler and more. And the best thing: I will be speaking about using CouchDB with Ruby/Rails, starring live coding and couch potato – my own little persistence layer for CouchDB.

Well, sort of. We are going to the north sea over the next weekend. Following our heroes at 37signals we will be spending two days at the countryside discussing the future of our little company.

Of the 6 people going everyone will be doing 2 15 minute talks: one about upstream and his/her involvement, one about a random topic of interest. The goal of this trip is to find out what upstream should stand for and do in 2009 (and to take as many pictures as possible, cook and eat lots of yum food and relax at the fireplace).

I’ll blog about the results after the weekend, stay tuned