Rendering maths from a web page

Occasionally I do pretty math intensive coding.
And one of the best pieces of software for writing about maths is TeX.
It was written by one of the gurus/fathers of modern computer science in 1978, and is still in use all over the world. So when it comes to putting math on the web, it used to be a workflow like this

• render math using tex
• copy and paste somewhere
• add an image link to your docs.

However some clever people have made that process so much easier: Two efforts in particular look very nice

• TeX Formulas - from the Google Chart API
• MathJax

Heres some mathjax : $ \nabla \times \vec{\rho} = 0 $
Heres the same thing using the google api:

I think the mathjax is nicer, but the google charts version is easier to integrate.

Using saru with googlemock and googletest

Saru (earlier blog post) is my little testing framework. It does everything we need. It's been used in several serious software development situations. But sometimes things are a little painful.

For example, saru doesn't come with any nice mocking helpers for C++. There is a basic C++ testing library that comes with it, but writing your own mocks by hand is one of those painful things I mentioned.

Thankfully there's a nice mocking library for C++ from the folks at google, called oddly enough, googlemock. However googlemock is designed to work with googletest - the google testing framework.

Googletest is also great. But its orthogonal to saru, rather than competitive. Saru is cross-language and designed to be more of a test-running wrapper, while googletest is a c++ unit testing library.

So I had three options if I wanted to use google-mock with my code and saru.

1. Make the google-mocks work with the saru-cxx library.
2. Make google-test output in a format that saru could digest.
3. Make saru able to parse google-test output.

IMO the third is the wisest and most extensible option. Luckily the changes were pretty easy.

So now getting a google-test file working in saru is as trivial as adding a

\\SARU : Format gtest

to the top of the test file.. and everything just works :)
(Well you'll need to make sure the compiler can find the right includes and the gtest library.. but thats all)

For example I get this kind of output when running a test suite.

99-misc-00-periodic-processor.cpp::TestFixture::test_process_many : OK
gmock_test.cpp::PartyTest.CallsDance : OK
gmock_test.cpp::PartyTest.CallsDanceFails : FAILED
==MESSAGE==

==STDERR==
gmock_test.cpp:69: Failure
Value of: p.party()
  Actual: false
Expected: true