The future of Culerity/Celerity

[jnicklas]

Hopefully we'll be able to hit a 1.0 release candidate in a couple of
weeks. With that in mind, I'd like to discuss the Celerity and
Culerity drivers. We have an alternative now, Akephalos, which in my
opinion is strictly better. I personally never use those drivers
anymore.

I'd personally like to split out these drivers into a separate
repository. The resulting gem would probably be called capybara-
celerity. I would make sure that this new gem is compatible with
Capybara 1.0, but after that I would abandon maintainance of the gem.
If someone else wants to take it over, I would appreciate that a lot.

Basically the plan is to phase out celerity/culerity support out of
Capybara.

Thoughts?

/Jonas

[Phillip Koebbe]

Short answer: +1

Long answer:

I have a growing suite that is currently comprised of 150 scenarios
(1170 steps), of which 19 scenarios (180 steps) are JavaScript
dependent. The number of JS dependent steps will continue to grow, and
the suite will continue to slow down. I had been using Culerity with
JRuby 1.5.6 and Nailgun, but not having those external processes to
manage is nice. I did notice that Akephalos is slower in Ruby 1.8.7, but
faster in Ruby 1.9.1 (I am planning on moving to 1.9.2 soon, but can't
yet). Besides the speed advantage in 1.9.1, I also get my application
tested in 1.9.1 whereas with JRuby 1.5.6, the application is actually
running in 1.8.7. I tried JRuby 1.6.0.RC1 yesterday, but the Nailgun
server wouldn't launch in 1.9 mode. That's when I decided to switch to
Akephalos. And I was very pleasantly surprised when my entire suite
passed with no changes.

I uninstalled C[eu]lerity and got errors about needing Capybara >=
0.3.5, so I assumed that they must be installed at this point. So if
splitting them out will remove the need for them to be installed at all,
then yes, I'm in favor.

For the record, my opinion is that C[eu]lerity are awesome tools and I'm
grateful for all the work that has gone into them. Thanks to Jari, Alex
and everyone else that brought them to us!

Peace,
Phillip

[Phillip Koebbe]

On 2011-02-09 6:17 AM, Phillip Koebbe wrote:
>
> Besides the speed advantage in 1.9.1, I also get my application tested
> in 1.9.1 whereas with JRuby 1.5.6, the application is actually running
> in 1.8.7.

Actually, I don't know if this is correct. Can anyone confirm/deny the
actual version of Ruby that the application is running under with Akephalos?

Peace,
Phillip

[Bernerd Schaefer]

Actually, I don't know if this is correct. Can anyone confirm/deny the actual version of Ruby that the application is running under with Akephalos?

The application is booted from within the spec / cucumber suite just like other drivers, so it will be run with whatever ruby version you're currently using. Akephalos itself will run with jruby in 1.8 mode, which is fine since no application code is executed directly against the remote akephalos process. I also run the akephalos suite with 1.8 and 1.9 to ensure there aren't any problems communicating over DRb between a 1.9 process and the jruby process.

Bernerd 

 

[Jonas Nicklas]

> For the record, my opinion is that C[eu]lerity are awesome tools and I'm grateful for all the work that has gone into them. Thanks to Jari, Alex and everyone else that brought them to us!

Absolutely! They are fantastic tools, I hope no one takes my original
message as an offense, I'm interested in Capybara being as simple to
maintain as possible and having as few dependencies as possible.
Splitting out those drivers is a step in that direction, and I really
do hope someone does take over maintainance.

[Phillip Koebbe]

On 2011-02-09 9:48 AM, Jonas Nicklas wrote:
>> For the record, my opinion is that C[eu]lerity are awesome tools and I'm grateful for all the work that has gone into them. Thanks to Jari, Alex and everyone else that brought them to us!
> Absolutely! They are fantastic tools, I hope no one takes my original
> message as an offense, I'm interested in Capybara being as simple to
> maintain as possible and having as few dependencies as possible.
> Splitting out those drivers is a step in that direction, and I really
> do hope someone does take over maintainance.

Heh. I didn't take your message that way, but like you, I didn't want
anyone to think that by switching to Akephalos I was implying that
C[eu]lerity aren't valuable.

Just trying to give credit where credit is due. I hope I didn't
inadvertently imply that Jonas was being thoughtless.

Peace,
Phillip

[Jari Bakken]

> On 2011-02-09 9:48 AM, Jonas Nicklas wrote:
>>>
>>> For the record, my opinion is that C[eu]lerity are awesome tools and I'm
>>> grateful for all the work that has gone into them. Thanks to Jari, Alex and
>>> everyone else that brought them to us!
>>
>> Absolutely! They are fantastic tools, I hope no one takes my original
>> message as an offense, I'm interested in Capybara being as simple to
>> maintain as possible and having as few dependencies as possible.
>> Splitting out those drivers is a step in that direction, and I really
>> do hope someone does take over maintainance.
>

No offense taken. This sounds like a wise move for Capybara, and
personally I've shifted focus to selenium-webdriver since HtmlUnit
unfortunately didn't provide the necessary realism for the legacy app
I'm testing. I'm happy that it works well for others though :)

[Gabriel Sobrinho]

I agree and I can help with these drivers after your release.

Call me if you would help.

Cheers

[Gabriel Sobrinho]

Submitted as pull request: https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara/pull/296

[Jonas Nicklas]

And merged!

Thanks for putting in the work Gabriel. Hopefully the drivers will
continue to be useful to people, and it'll be easier to maintain
Capybara. I feel pretty good about this change :)

/Jonas