When I started using TypeScript for my Angular applications, I was confused about all the different ways with which you could import other modules. import './polyfills.ts'; import { Component } from '@angular/core'; import HomeComponent from './pages/home/home-page.component'; import * as _ from 'lodash'; import assert = require('assert'); At first, I thought that as a programmer you could choose whether you wanted to use curly braces or not, but I quickly found out that that was not the case. It all depends on how the module that you are importing is structured. I have created an overview of the different ways by which a module can be exported, together with their corresponding import syntax. Most of them are actually plain ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) module syntax that TypeScript uses as well. The examples are from my solution to the first puzzle of Advent of Code 2016 and can be found on GitHub if you want to play around with imports and exports yourself.

Writing unit tests for our handlers in Ratpack is easy with RequestFixture. We invoke the handle method and use a Handler or Chain we want to test as argument. We can provide extra details on the fixture instance with a second argument, for example adding objects to the registry or setting the request method. The handle method returns a HandlingResult object. This object has the method exception that we can use to see if an exception occurred in our code under test. The method throws a HandlerExceptionNotThrownException if the expected exception doesn’t occur.

Sometimes we are working on a new feature in our code and we want to write a specification for it without yet really implementing the feature. To indicate we know the specification will fail while we are implementing the feature we can add the @PendingFeature annotation to our specification method. With this annotation Spock will still execute the test, but will set the status to ignored if the test fails. But if the test passes the status is set to failed. So when we have finished the feature we need to remove the annotation and Spock will kindly remind us to do so this way.