The problem
It is a law of software development that the earlier one identifies a problem the cheaper (and less embarrassing) it is to fix. Hence, we developers strive to identify errors early on our own development machines aided by sound development methodologies, tools, and tests (at best automated).
A particular quality assurance challenge with dynamic technologies like Ruby/Rails, Javascript or view templates like ERB is that you have no compiler that checks for syntax errors in advance. So you have to have 100% test coverage (which is often too expensive to be realistic) in order to be assured that even simple syntax errors does not occur.
Furthermore in the case of Ruby On Rails, which is of heavily opinionated nature, there are many conventions that can be broken by mistakes, which may introduce errors that do no show up initially. This introduces additional testing/debugging work for the programmers (in particular for newcomers to RoR).
Happily Ruby On Rails is so productive a web technology that it more then compensates for these difficulties but even though would it not be nice with some automated tool to help out a bit?
Unfortunately, your typical Ruby development tools does not provide any kind of static verification checks since the problem appears to be just about unsolvable in the general case (because of the dynamic nature of Ruby).
But what about the smaller problem of static verification checks for Ruby On Rails projects only? The RoR domain is much smaller and highly standardized so what is impossible for the entire domain of Ruby programs should be partly possible in Ruby On Rails!
Railcheck
So inspired by LINT , the power of Ruby meta-programming and various RoR testing snippets on the web, I wrote this initial beta release of Railcheck which is a semi-static verifier for your Ruby on Rails projects.
Delivered as a free Ruby gem the Railscheck project provides a shell command task “railscheck” that you can run against your Rails projects to test for a number of typical bugs and inconsistencies. See the project site and linked readme file at railscheck.rubyforge.org for details about how to install and run the tool and much more.
Railscheck is a working beta. The gem works and is useful but has a limited feature set. Much more to come. Use the rubyforge tracker function on the Railscheck website to suggest features that you would like to be added (or bugs to fix). You are also very welcome to add code/tests to the project, which is open source. Indeed the project is now open to new contributing members.
Update:
Updated the gem with improved contributor documentation, an explicit gem dependency and a fix for a typing error in railscheck.rb file. Try again if you had problems.
Tags: copenhagenrb
