In Week 1 of the Makers Academy Course, a challenge is issued to model and airport in Ruby. This Repo aims to do just that but in Python instead. Click here to see the ruby version.

The user stories are as follows:

As a pilot
So that I can arrive at my specified destination
I would like to land my plane at the appropriate airport

As a pilot
So that I can set off for my specified destination
I would like to be able to take off from the appropriate airport

As an air traffic controller
So that I can avoid collisions
I want to be able to prevent airplanes landing when the airport if full

As an air traffic controller
So that I can avoid accidents
I want to be able to prevent airplanes landing when the weather is stormy

The first step was to learnt the python specific testing suites. For this challenge I used the unittest suite. Once I had mastered the testing suite, I firstly developed the plane class. This is a simple class which knows if the plane is flying or not. The airport class was next which would land a plane, store it and then release it again, depending on the weather. The weather class was developed last. The class generates a random number which determines the weather.

This is my first ever Python program, so the first challenge was to learn the language. As I have a good understanding of Ruby and OO principles, this was relatively straight forward. The real difficulty, when learning a new language, comes when using the test suites.

Unittest syntax is completely different to rspec. Stubbing took a little bit of time to understand in unittest and dealing with random number generators is still a little bit of puzzle for me.

Once the repo has been cloned you can run the program in the python shell.

$ from plane import Plane
$ from airport import Airport
$ from weather import Weather

This will import all the classes from the relevant files.

$ heathrow = Airport()
$ jet = Plane()

This will create instances of their respective classes.

Planes are initialised flying (in the air), the following functions can now be used:

2.2.1 :004 > heathrow.land_plane(jet)  #lands a plane at the airport.
2.2.1 :005 > heathrow.planes  #returns all planes currently stored at the airport.
2.2.1 :006 > heathrow.capacity  #returns the capacity of the airport.(20)
2.2.1 :007 > heathrow.release_plane(jet)  #releases the plane which has been passed as an argument.

On occasion a storm may take hold making in impossible for an airport to take in any more planes

2.2.1 :008 > heathrow.land_plane jet
      => "The storm has made it impossible to land"  

If a storm is in town, planes cannot take off.

To run the tests, choose the test file and run using python, for example:

$ python airport_unittest.py