Jamie on Software

Searching SQL with Sphinx

SQL wasn’t built for fast text searching - and there is only so much you can do with a LIKE statement. But more and more we are being asked to develop search functionality, and more and more developers are having to build increasingly powerful search mechanisms to handle the high level of search sophistication we now see as the default.

Testing RESTful response types

ruby, ruby on rails, testing

I’ve been doing a lot of Rails development recently as part of my new job (our whole infrastructure is built on Rails, you see), and have been practicing Test-driven Development religiously. As part of this, I’ve been developing an API that returns more than one response format, and I was looking to find out how to test if the correct response type is being returned.