[ANN] Merb Mind Maps - a tutorial on RSpec, GraphViz & a little Merb

Netizens:

Crispin & Gregory’s new book, /Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for
Testers and
Agile Teams/, has a kewt “mind map” at the start of each chapter. It
inspired me
to find a way to use the “tag cloud” on a blog to draw a mind map of the
posts,
linked by their tags in common.

The result is this little project:

Radar – O’Reilly

It showcases…

  • graph theory - including Minimum Spanning Tree
  • GraphViz - to typeset the mind maps
  • Merb - a Rails-style website platform
  • Ruby - that annoying language that won’t go away
  • RSpec - a Behavior Driven Development system
  • transparent PNG files with ImageMagick drop-shadows
  • assert{ 2.0 } - an assertion that reflects its expressions
  • assert{ xpath } - the latest version of my assert_xpath system
  • TDD for algorithms & graph theory!
  • fixture-dependencies - a Rails fixture clone with more features
  • GraphvizR - a lite Ruby gem that wraps GraphViz dot notation
  • and even a tiny bit of HAML!

The algorithm itself depends on none of those things, so any blog could
use the
algorithm to present the mind-maps that are already latent within it!