Roman Numerals Kata, Ruby and RSpec

So I’ve been doing the Roman Numerals kata for nearly a week now – bit bored of it but I’ll swap out on Monday. I’ve been doing it in Ruby, started with test/unit but quickly changed to RSpec to learn the BDD approach.

From what I’ve experienced so far I really like BDD. It feels like the an evolutionary step on from TDD and RSpec in Ruby in particular is very smoothly put together and scans superbly in the code. Here’s a quick example of an RSpec spec:

describe "Roman Numerals Converter" do
  before :each do
    @numerals = RomanNumerals.new
  end
  context "special symbols" do
    it "converts 1 to I" do
      @numerals.toRoman( 1 ).should eq "I"
    end
    it "converts 5 to V" do
      @numerals.toRoman( 5 ).should eq "V"
    end
  end
end

I’ve uploaded my full Ruby/RSpec solution to GitHub here

Might try combining my next attempt with Cucumber for acceptance tests might keep it interesting until Monday…

Ruby development essentials

Here’s a quick list of the tools I’m discovering I need or find useful for Ruby development:

• Vim!
  • Vim autocomplete for Ruby – http://www.cuberick.com/2008/10/ruby-autocomplete-in-vim.html
• JRuby http://jruby.org/
  • A Ruby interpreter implementation with easy Java interaction, simply “require ‘java'” at the top of your Ruby script and run the script with ‘jruby’ instead or ‘ruby’
• Ruby test/unit http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/test/unit/rdoc/Test/Unit.html
• RSpec http://rspec.info/
  • Install in JRuby with ‘jruby -S gem install rspec’
  • Use in JRuby with ‘jruby -S rspec <spec file>’