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Becoming a Software Developer part 7: Ruby for the Internet Nuby

  • May 24, 2002
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It's easy to write simple scripts for sending emails — but hard to make sure that your application deals with all the weird and wonderful things that can go wrong.
Pete McBreen is the author of Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative (Addison-Wesley, 2001, ISBN 0-201-73386-2). Software Craftsmanship has been named as a finalist in Software Development magazine's 12th Annual Jolt Awards (see http://www.sdmagazine.com/jolts/press_r1-29-02.htm).
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Introduction

This series of articles started off by looking at "Ruby for the Nuby," introduced the ideas of "Test-Driven Development," and then branched off to look at how to use version control. The next three articles looked at requirements (Part 4: Understanding Use Cases and Requirements), how to test them (Part 5: Creating Acceptance Tests from Use Cases), and the "simple matter of programming" (Part 6: Design and Programming). This article brings this all together and shows a very small part of one use case of the overall running club membership application.

The use case that we'll use for this article is the one introduced in Part 4 of this series, sending emails to notify members of special events. This will demonstrate the use of the Net::SMTP classes in Ruby, and in the process show how simple it is to use Ruby as a scripting language for the Internet.

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