Running Rails in the Background

One difference between TDD in a Rails context and TDD in SUnit’s original Smalltalk environment is that testing a Rails program typically requires that Ruby be started from the command line and that the Rails environment is loaded. Starting from the command line can take quite a bit of time on even a moderate-size Rails project. If we’re trying to run, say, a single file’s worth of tests that we expect to take about a second, having the Rails startup take more than a minute ...