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Learn Web Development Through Testing

Use pre-made integration tests to learn how to code functional websites by focussing primarily on “how it should work” and only secondly on “how this is built”.

Homework tests are run completely independently of whatever web-server, programming-language or framework is used to solve the ‘problems’ provided by the tests.

It is left to the user to select server, technology, language etc. to solve the problem at hand.

This basically turns around the idea of learning to code by putting the end-user experience at the forefront and the technology used to solve the problem after.

An example session:

Make sure you have all gems installed by running bundler

bundle install

Configure your target server in ./spec/spec_helper:

# configure which host to call up on
Capybara.app_host = "http://localhost:3000"

Now, run the newsletter test (Automatically a browser will pop up)

rspec ./spec/features/newsletter_spec.rb

See it fail

Failure/Error: expect(page).to have_content "Sign up"

Check out the test (https://github.com/akaalias/homework/blob/master/spec/features/newsletter_spec.rb) and begin “fixing” the tests by implementing a web page (again, in whatever language, method and server you want) that has a button called “Sign up”.

In fact, if you’re just starting with this test, you might not even have a web-server running! So, you have to figure that out as well. Start a Rails project or install LAMP or whatever you need to do to serve (dynamic) pages.

[...]
<input type="submit" value="Sign up">
[...]