Before I start this summary, it should be pointed out that there is a bug with how Google indexed this video. Every other video’s title begins with ‘GTAC 2007’, but this one begins with ‘GTAC 07’ which means that it could get omitted from search results quite easily. This happened to be the one presentation I was most looking forward to, but I thought it was cancelled until I saw the GTAC playlist; I was originally having new videos pushed to me via an RSS search. Where do we log bugs against the mighty Google index?

Anyways. As mentioned above, I had high hopes for this presentation and in the end, they were somewhat dashed. This video as an experience report from two people who work on the Ringo framework that Google has written (not yet publicly available, but will be once they rejig some proprietary parts out of it). I had hoped it would be a tutorial type session similar to some of the other ones on DSLs. There were a few tidbits worth recalling though.

• Requirements vs. desirements — gotta love those new words
• The framework is maintained by a dedicated team which is critical I think. Having written and maintained a couple of these (though certainly not this ambitious) I can attest to how hard it is to maintain / extend a framework while simultaneously trying to write more tests that use it.
• UI elements are all handled through the same methods regardless of type. This means an object type change does not have a corresponding test code change — very cool
• They even wrote a custom extension to Firebug to give them some of the information they need for object mapping

Direct link here.