At my day job we have several Rails apps that we've built and continue to maintain and enhance. We often add features that are usable in all of our applications, so although they're often initially developed in one app or another, they quickly get turned into plugins that we can share across all of our apps.

My boss and fellow Rails developer Aaron Baldwin has been typically hacking on plugins that are strictly internal and wouldn't be of much use to anyone outside of our organization, whereas I've been fortunate enough to get to work on things that are more generic and thus releaseable to the broader community. So, it's particularly noteworthy that Aaron released his first public Rails plugin this week, and this is one of those plugins that, now that I've used it, I don't know how I could have ever coded Rails without it.

Here's what it's for. When writing integration tests you often test that certain elements exist on the page. The problem though, is that when one of these tests fail, all you're told is that an element of some type was expected, but none were found. Was the element really not there? Or is there a typo in your test? Or on the page? Or... what? I've found myself in this scenario desperately wishing I could just see the page that the test was testing in my browser window so I could look for myself.

Enter ICandy. ICandy is a Ruby on Rails plugin that automatically displays the page from failing integration tests in your browser window. You can also manually trigger certain pages to open in your browser, if you desire. It's been tested to work with Safari and Firefox on Mac and Firefox on Ubuntu.