be nice to ducks or I will mock you
Posted by Mike
When I first started programming Ruby I lurked on the Seattle.rb mailing list and then gathered the courage to finally attend a meeting. At the time I had written a Perl script that did the basics of what MMS2R does and it was lucky for me that Aaron Patterson who coincidently maintains WWW::Mechanize was also a member of Seattle.rb. My Perl script was using Perl’s original version of WWW::Mechanize to scrape pictures from MMS that were sent by mobile subscribers to Sprint.
I knew that it would be a great experience to me if I converted the Perl script into a Gem. I would be contributing to the Ruby community, I would be learning how to author a Gem, and I would improve on my coding and testing abilities.
A testing problem I was perplexed with was how should I test my code that reaches out to Sprint’s content servers to scrape images? The other cellular carriers actually deliver their images mime-encoded in the MMS payload so testing them in a closed environment is simple enough with a fixture.
