The UI is a different ball game (and as browsers evolve it will continuously change), and there are tools out there to solve it in some way or another. With the Rails tests, at least you have confidence that your backend is correct which is probably 80% of the battle.

Also, the value of automated tests in general is to give you confidence that the small change you just made didn't break something else!

And with the apps I've worked on, about 80% of the battle was the UI. The backend was usually pretty simple data storage. That could be because my career has been largely UI-centric, but there are certainly apps out there where the UI code is more complex than the computation itself.

Yeah, this blog post was definitely inflammatory . . .

well, that and the whole ungodly slowness thing.

That's pure FUD -- it's nowhere near as slow as you imply.

rails doesn't provide any facility for testing the stuff that is actually hard to test - the frontend javascript/flash/ui layer.

That's not true. Every popular testing library for Rails (stock or third-party) has view testing. I noticed you threw in Flash. Do you really expect your web application framework to test your Flash files? What would that look like?

it makes it easy to test stuff that shouldn't need testing.

Your domain modeling, controllers, and all-around application logic shouldn't need testing?

I guess we'll just have to disagree on whether or not there's software that doesn't "need testing"