At the last session we finally managed to get the datastore sorted out along with the basic application flow that it should have (not entirely implemented yet).
You can look at the code in GitHub so in terms of the report I’ll just mention some of the side conversation. There was a point as to whether passing parameters via a hash map was the preferred way of doing things. Points raised in favour of doing it include named parameters and the ability to consume options from the map and pass it along to other objects.
The application should call a redirect when dealing with the POST from the pizza form. The next page should be a list of people who are going to the next Ruby Tuesday. I think we should also have the personal confirmation message as well. Probably stashing the Confirmation in the Flash scope.
There was also a bit of discussion around testing the application. In its current state the application is a bit of hack and has not been driven by TDD (it has instead been driven by a need to order pizza). Coverage is therefore poor and while specifications were passing for most of the session the app was completely broken and needed post-session hacking to get it to run. TDD can lead to devs being a bit blinkered as to what is happening with the code in general. You need to actually run your application and see that it is still making sense at the user interaction level.
There was a discussion about the value of testing getters and setters in Ruby. Although this is still low-value testing there is actually nothing guaranteeing that any of the getters, setters or constructors work unless you have a runtime test for them. There doesn’t seem to be an alternative but to test them.