However, I still got 14 commits in.  (All of them Friday morning.)

The work done was all in finalizing the /downloads/complete-new-os/ page, and tracking down and fixing errors that had cropped up in the upload process.

The second item distresses me, presently, since a solid upload system was the main impetus for the rewrite.  finding out that uploads are still fragile and very prone to breaking with forward development, combined with the fact that I don’t have a testing strategy for roundtrip uploads, means I’m kinda nervous.

So, anyone out there have a good solution for a round-trip integration test where you upload, via flash and javascript, a unique file, and then verify that the file exists on a unix filesystem, and then verify that a corresponding database entry and further corresponding webpage works?

Moving forward, I’ll be working on an administrative page to allow file owners/admins to associate file instances as older/newer versions of the same file.

However, we haven’t spent the time yet to pretty the ol’ girl up for public consumption (which we totally should), so I decided to just use the basic core of SimpleTest while developing (as a personal project) the third iteration of the verge 2d game engine’s website (wip).

I didn’t know what I got myself into.

Here’s some hard-earned knowledge I wrestled from the core of this beasty. These simple statements represent hours of shouting, grunting, and crying defiantly into the rain-filled sky daring a cruel god to strike me down.

SimpleTest Lessons

1. assertFieldById() and assertFieldByName() do not work on html input elements which are improperly placed outside of <form> tags.

2. There do not appear to be out-of-the-box accessors for field values. I had to code up my own getFieldById().

3. If an element has an id, but not a name, it’s value will be inaccessible.

This list is not exhaustive

Learn these lessons, fair reader, so that you may not stub thy code-toe upon SimpleTest! And one day maybe we’ll get around to releasing IMVU’s Sweet Suite of Not-So-Simpletest.

Gruedorf: Verge-rpg 3.0 cometh

It’s both Something New
and Something Blue.

Quite a while ago I commissioned (as in paid) Evilbob for a new more-betterer version of vrpg. I’ve lately gotten around to start implementing it. Hooray.

You can go view it over at http://beta.verge-rpg.com.

I’m aiming to do away with the evil login/session error and provide a more reliable upload system. Amoung other things.

The new system is built upon cakePHP on the backend, providing a pleasant MVC framework for me to focus on actual controlling and display logic instead of shouldering the retarded parts of a website’s overhead myself. On the javascript side I’ll be leaning heavily upon the YUI, which has already made my life a lot saner.

My goals include making this mofo render sanely on IE6 and up, FF2 and up, and the current versions of Opera and Safari (I have a bit of work to go towards these goals). When the user, board, file, and documentation functionality is in the new version and working better than the current live version, I’ll bring everything from beta over to the live site, and retire the Old Ways.

The beta site is currently hooked up to the real data, so you can login and see how newsposts currently render, but I’m still very early on into this implementation. So yeah.

subversion, gdorf 19.

The source for this experiment is in http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/vrpg3.0/. As of this posting we’re at r39.

Now it’s time to go eat some delicious steak!

Unsettle deliberate banana-farm elitist monster bone. Disgusting foodstuff edible taco taco burrito not because good word thing.

Er, wait.

A little discombobulated. Today’s update is a low water mark for myself consisting of a new chr which is just a recolored semi-spoiler and some scant tests for the sully system.

svn download

Oh my goodness, http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/. Whee link.

Oh right…

Also, for those keeping score at home, I actually did make a surrogate post last week over at The verge-rpg.com forums. This was because I foolishly let my dear, sweet egometry.com unregister, and I had to hastily repurchase it. While I got the domain back, the DNS was all bjorked for a bit, so I couldn’t reach this place to post.

Last week, regurgitated.

Added vctest.vc, which introduces a vc testing suite.

Basically: you create any number of functions in the system.vc space that start with "test" and have no args and return void. In those functions you must have one or more assertTrue and/or assertFalse functions. Call runtests(), and all your tests will run.

If anything fails, the program will exit.

Exciting, eh?