"PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG."

"Shim is a node.js-based browser-compatibility tool that lets you synchronize several devices/browsers and surf the same pages simultaneously on all of them." Wow.

"MockSMTP is a native Mac application that embeds its own SMTP server. It also features an e-mail client browser, enabling instant viewing of both raw content and HTML rendering, so you can see how your mail looks when delivered." What an excellent idea.

"I’m unfamiliar with a lot of the songs we do, and though I get to know them pretty well during the testing process, I rarely have a chance to get sick of them thanks to our relentless schedule. So when faced with a year of testing 45 very familiar songs for The Beatles: Rock Band, it seemed inevitable that I’d end up a Stones guy when the project was through. Then, last night at the company release party, I hung out in front of an Xbox with some thirty coworkers and sang along to Beatles songs for over four hours at the top of my lungs. When I woke up this morning, I actually yawned blood." Well done, Dan.

"‘sdfsdf ‘means, I would argue, ‘I am testing’, or even more specifically, ‘I am now testing what can be seen’. It’s another performative expression because there is no semantic distance between typing this string and doing what it says, in the same way that there is no semantic distance between saying ‘I do’ in your marriage vows and actually performing your marriage vows. Saying is doing."

You can now use Shoulda macros in RSpec as well as Test::Unit. Thanks, Thoughtbot! Might take a poke at this some time.

Playground for Google's Ajax APIs. Well implemented, and very useful.

Mitch just isn't inspired by user-generated content, no matter how charming a core game might be. The comments thread on this one is really good.

"Faker, a port of Data::Faker from Perl, is used to easily generate fake data: names, addresses, phone numbers, etc."

"The tests are the program. Without the tests, the program does not work. Tests are not something that should be left for the inexperienced; tests are the hard part."

Nice alternative to the somewhat clunky fixture_replacement - factories for generating fixtures for your tests and specs. Yummy!

"We can now deal with forms in the language of our stories, something that the customer understands and relates to." Webrat lets you navigate your Rails app through the DOM, rather than HTTP.

"FixtureReplacement is a Rails plugin that provides a simple way to quickly populate your test database with model objects without having to manage multiple, brittle fixture files." Looks very handy indeed.

Hosted subversion and continuous integration specifically for Rails development. Looks interesting; reasonably competitive pricing.

"Instead, user research for the Web should delve into the qualitative aspects of design to understand how and why people respond to what has been created, and, more importantly, how to apply that insight to future work." Lane Becker on fine form.

"I'll show you an example of an integration test I wrote with Test::Unit a while back and then converted to use Story Runner earlier today." RSpec's Story Runner looks quite interesting.

ies4osx rns lots of versions of IE under Wine on OSX. Looks nifty.

Mailtrap helps you test ActionMailer: "Yesterday I mocked up the simplest, dumbest, Ruby SMTP server you can imagine. It speaks just enough SMTP to allow ActionMailer to make a connection and send it a message."

"The default RSpec syntax is good, but it can’t be everything to everyone. If you’re not writing matchers, you’re missing out on the full potential of RSpec."

Pimping Autotest for fun and profit. And Growl notification. Nice!

Just what I needed right now. This is a verbose approach, but it has the kind of granularity I like.

A great Dan North entry on stories and BDD.

"Bungie's designers aren't just making a game: They're trying to divine the golden mean of fun." Large Wired article on how Bungie do UX research for Halo 3.

Some useful examples for using RSpec with controllers.

Nice introduction to test::spec from Chris; need to re-read this at some point.

The Thoughbot gang bring another testing solution to the Rails table.

A quick guide to getting started with Mocha - the Ruby library for mocking objects in tests.

Because you’re passing in a mock representation of the real HTTP parameters, you don’t want to use the string versions of the parameters but actually set the parameter hash directly. Duh. So, when your controller is expecting a nested hash keyed off t

There is a place for browser drivers (like Selenium or Sahi) and for suites based on browser emulation techniques (such as HTTPUnit or Twill). Knowing which to use and when can result in significant time savings when running your test suites.

Nice collection of articles on testing from the New Bamboo folks.

Behaviour-driven development with rSpec. Looks like good stuff - I like the approach, but I'd have to sit down and work out some things from scratch. Still, well written, and I'm sold in principle. Now to find time to learn it...

Because, you know, if you're going to test models and controllers, test the damn views!

Great. Automated testing for valid view output. I'm going to try and get this in place once I start testing more.

Will need this at some point, as it contradicts (and supercedes) the Agile book...