[LRUG] November meeting - speakers required!

[James Adam]

November's LRUG is fast approaching and we're still shy one speaker,
with only an offer from Priit. We (I) need to decide in the next few
days, so I'll do the honourable thing and throw an idea of my own into
the ring, and then we can all decide.

Without wanting to even slightly stir up more passionate pro- or
anti-cucumber debate, I have been toying with an implementation of a
cucumber-ish language that uses Ruby 1.9 and methods, rather than
string/regexp matching. At the moment, it's call "Snozcumber", and is
barely more than a sketch; you can peruse some actual, hacky code to
see what I'm thinking about here[1], but an example is:

  Scenario "I should have fun at the zoo" do
    Given a_monkey_called "dave"
    And a_donkey_called "alex", who_is: 29, and_loves_to_eat: "cans"
    When i_visit_the_zoo
    Then i_should_have_fun_with "dave", and: "alex"
  end

One thing I'm pleased with is when a "step" is undefined, it will
print out a method definition template which you can copy and paste
into your 'steps' file to flesh out. This is one of the big wins with
cucumber for me - you get to express all the behaviour in a scenario
first, rather than getting immediately hung up worrying about how to
write the test.

I'm not sure that there's a huge amount of very interesting Ruby
behind this - a little 1.9 goodness in the new hash form, and some
questionable metaprogramming - but I'd be happy to talk through some
of the implementation and maybe discuss whether or not it's actually
interesting or pointless. Regardless, you can poke around it on github
and see for yourself. Bear in mind this is something that I just wrote
in the last half hour to see if my idea about a
cucumber-but-actually-ruby was even slightly feasible.

We really need to decide on the second talk for LRUG so whoever's
talking has a decent amount of time to prepare. It looks like the
other options which has garnered a response is Priit's git-deployment
one. What think ye, LRUG? WHAT THING YE?

- James

[1]:  http://github.com/freerange/snozcumber