Eric on Tracks

As of tonight, all three of Tracks’s test systems (Test::Unit, RSpec, and Selenium) have fully passing suites. It’s been forever since the Selenium tests worked, and the switch to jQuery has fixed a major bug that was causing transient failures with them. I had to tweak a bit and remove a few tests in the Test::Unit suite, but the RSpec suite was fine. This is the first time in a while that all tests that come with Tracks have passed. Now I can really implement test-driven development!

As I run my own branch of Tracks as my primary instance, I’m finding more and more little things I have to clean up. Today it was things like contexts hiding when they’re empty, autocomplete on the Default Context field, deleting contexts, and a few other little things. I’m making progress, but I keep finding more things.

The good news is that the weird problem we had with Prototype where some JavaScript XHR requests would get rendered to the browser as text is completely gone! This means our Selenium test suite can actually run correctly. I’m up to 52 passes and 32 failures. Our test suite is by no means comprehensive, but at least I have a target to hit. Many of the 32 failures are simply tests that need to be modified slightly to work with the new behaviors.

After an insane afternoon and evening of coding, during which I fixed some bugs, added autocompletion, and almost finished re-writing the contexts page, I realize I’m almost done with the first phase of my project! All I really have left to do is fix up the contexts and recurring todo pages and get rid of some code duplication in application.js. I also need to attack a few little uses of raw Prototype here and there, but jQuery-powered Tracks is almost up to the level of functionality offered by the old Tracks.

After I wrap up phase 1, phase 2 is going to be lots of features. Re-implementing the functionality I ripped out has been a piece of cake now that I’m in pure jQuery. Adding new features will be even easier. I have fifteen bugs in our tracker assigned to me, and it’s time I start working some of them off.

In addition, I’m taking over integration of the task dependencies branch created by Henrik Bohre. He’s busy with other things at the moment, but his work is almost complete. Once I’ve merged my jQuery branch back into the trunk, I can work on integrating his branch. Tracks 1.8 is going to be an amazing release.

I’ve finally gotten my jQuery branch of Tracks to the point where I can use it personally as I develop it. Autocomplete is still out of the picture, but the rest of the behavior of the home page works well now. Today I got the submission of the new todo form working via Ajax, which completes the home page functionality.

By eating my own dog food, as they say, I can more easily identify the pain points that are still present in the rapidly-evolving jQuery branch. The lack of autocomplete is going to bug the heck out of me, so expect that to be fixed soon. There are some features that I don’t use regularly, such as recurring todos, that likely won’t benefit from dogfooding, but that’s what the rest of the semester is for!

Working on the JavaScript in Tracks is like unraveling a sweater. You pull on some seemingly innocuous thread hanging out, and before you know it, the entire sweater has come undone. I knew things wouldn’t get finished unless I completely removed Prototype, but in pulling it out I’ve destroyed much of the functionality of Tracks. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting things back to a usable state, and to that end I’m doing pretty well. Autocomplete is still gone, and won’t be back for a little while I as I work on more pressing issues. I’ve gotten the basic editing functionality back in place, but recurring todos are a bit of a mess. JavaScript is everywhere in Tracks, and re-writing it all is quite an undertaking. I’m still convinced I can finish by the end of the semester, and I think the results will be pretty impressive.

In other news, I’ve become pretty much the only active maintainer on Tracks. The other three or four core maintainers are currently busy with other parts of their lives and don’t have much time to contribute to the project. We still have new people asking questions on the mailing list, submitting bugs, and trying their hand at patches. The responsibility for interfacing with these people has now fallen on me, and I’m excited to take it on. I’ve been with the project for almost two years now, so I’m quite comfortable working with the newbies. It was my first major Rails project, much less open source, so I can relate to those who’ve never worked with Rails before. It’s a great project to cut your teeth on, and we do our best to be a welcoming community.