See also podcast-rr-176-rails-as-an-soa-client
at 11 minutes he talks about testing-concept-bounded-integration-tests
talk-rails-as-an-soa-client#bounded-integration-tests1 "These were tests that tested the entire stack of our rails application from top to bottom. HTML all the way down to the network, but we were testing that in isolation. We weren't actually hitting those shared services" talk-rails-as-an-soa-client#bounded-integration-tests1
at 13 minutes in process and out-of-process fakes
at 26 minutes he talks about the boundaries of the system and how you want to get from JSON that the server provides to the main objects as quickly as possible
talks about in-process and out-of-process contract testing
He talks about the embedded document pattern toward the end of the talk. Basically, it sounds like he's using it in the same way that the GOOS guys talk about idealizing external data using something like the AuctionMessageTranslater... they basically get back this massive JSON document with lots of attributes (and other data) they don't care about and use a declarative syntax to translate that JSON to just the objects that they do care about. Martin Fowler talks about this pattern, the Embedded Document pattern, here