I reached a milestone this late night with The Gemli Project and decided to go ahead and release it. This release follows an earlier blog post describing some syntactical sugar that was added along with pagination and count support, here:

http://www.jondavis.net/techblog/post/2009/10/05/GemliData-Pagination-and-Counts.aspx

Remember those tests I kept noting that I still need to add to test the deep loading and deep saving functionality? No? Well I remember them. I kept procrastinating them. And as it turned out, I’ve discovered that a lesson has been taught to me several times in the past, and again now while trying to implement a few basic tests, a lesson I never realized was being taught to me until finally just this late night. The lesson goes something like this:

If in your cocky self-confidence you procrastinate the tests of a complex system because it is complex and because you are confident, you are guaranteed to watch them fail when you finally add them.

Mind you, the “system” in context is not terribly complex, but I’ll confess there was tonight a rather ugly snippet of code to wade through, particularly while Jay Leno or some other show was playing in the background to keep me distracted. On that latter note, it wasn’t until I switched to ambient music that I was finally able to fix a bug that I’d spent hours staring at.

This milestone release represents 130 total unit tests since the lifetime of the project (about 10-20 or so new tests, not sure exactly how many), not nearly enough but enough to feel a lot better about what Gemli is shaping in itself. I still yet need to add a lot more tests, but what these tests exposed was a slew of buggy relationship inferences that needed to be taken care of. I felt the urgency to release now rather than continue to add tests first because the previous release was just not suitably functional on the relationships side.