RSpec provides a framework for writing what can be called executable specifications of program behavior. In this short post I want to explain why I use this framework in place of classic TestUnit library.

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Every time I’m creating fixtures for Rails application I’m being angry because any more or less considerable project needs tons of them. Most complicated thing is to track all relationships, validations, and to keep fixtures up to date. A few days ago Yurii Rashkovskii has released small utility — Fixturease. What if I would tell you that now you can create your fixtures using your models?

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Today I found that Sphinx search engine has been updated. Major new features include:

• extended query mode with boolean, field limits, phrases, and proximity support (eg.: @title "hello world"~10 | @body example program);
• extended sorting mode (eg.: @weight DESC @id ASC);
• combined phrase+statistical ranking which takes words frequencies into account (currently in extended mode only);
• official Python API;
• contributed Perl and Ruby APIs.

I have updated Sphinx Client Library along with Sphinx 0.9.7-RC2 Windows build.

I got new design for my blog finally! My wife has finished her work and presented sketch in her blog today. I’m highly impressed and want to see what do you think guys. Please look it (click on logo) and vote on sidebar or in the bottom of post. Thanks, your opinion is significant for me!

Corresponding post in IRIS Design blog.

Almost all Web-applications needs data search logic and really often this logic should have full-text search capabilities. If you are using MySQL database, you can use its FULLTEXT search, but it’s not efficient when you have a large amout of data. In this case third party search engines used, and one of them (and I think, the most efficient) is Sphinx. In this article I’ll present my port of Sphinx client library for Ruby and show how to use it.

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