Comments on: Javascript Test Driven Development With YUI Test

By: Simon Tiffert

Simon Tiffert — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:26:29 +0000

Because we use Selenium for our functional tests, we already had a setup for starting and controlling different browsers.
We added YUI tests with the YUI Testmanager and are tracking the results on the last page. In this way we have a setup to get the results back of IE, Firefox, Opera to our CI server.

Maybe interesting:
http://www.agimatec.de/blog/2009/01/javascript-unit-tests-with-the-yui-testmanager/

By: James Carr

James Carr — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:00:55 +0000

Actually the ability to plug different testing frameworks into js-test-driver is one of the goals of the project. I am currently working with the source to get an architecture in place that allows the ability to write an adapter for different frameworks to plug them in.

The first two frameworks on my list to try and get working with it is jspec and YUI Test.

By: Nicholas C. Zakas

Nicholas C. Zakas — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:49:42 +0000

Kumar – I think of JS Test Driver as a front end for the JavaScript unit testing frameworks. You still ultimately need code to be executed in the browser – JS Test Driver allows you to kick it off from a command line and other there are other tools that can do similar. I don’t think we’re necessarily comparing apples-to-apples on this one.

By: Kumar McMillan

Kumar McMillan — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:26:30 +0000

In all of these JavaScript unit testing frameworks I see (JsUnit, QUnit, etc) they all seem to depend too much on the web browser itself. This makes automation hard, it makes running tests on multiple browsers cumbersome, and it makes CI difficult. JsTestDriver – http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/ – takes a fresh approach whereby it treats each browser as a runtime environment that can live on any machine. You run tests from the command line; the script talks to a central server and runs tests simultaneously on all connected web browsers, reporting the result as text or xunit XML. I’ve been using it a fair bit and I wrote up a short article about it here: http://farmdev.com/thoughts/79/unit-testing-javascript-with-jstestdriver/

By: James Carr

James Carr — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:26:22 +0000

Thanks for the reply Nicholas! The next part of this series (following the different TDD frameworks) is to cover different mocking frameworks/strategies in javascript, so I’ll definitely have to follow up with the mocking framework in the YUI3 version.

By: Nicholas C. Zakas

Nicholas C. Zakas — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:18:47 +0000

I’m glad you enjoyed YUI Test. I can answer the question of it being actively developed because I’m actively developing it. There will continue to be development as long as I continue to receive feedback, and YUI Test has already been ported to YUI 3 (the YUI 3 version also includes a mocking utility). If you ever have feedback or suggestions, please feel free to contact me directly or start a conversation on ydn-javascript.

By: James Carr

James Carr — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:18:11 +0000

Hmmm… I actually think this would be a very good idea… CI in the cloud.

By: TJ Holowaychuk

TJ Holowaychuk — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:21:11 +0000

Another great writeup. Interesting to have nice summaries of everything out there, gives me some inspiration for JSpec I like posting to a URI feature, would be hella simple with JSpec’s abstracted reporting I will have to try that out.

I was also thinking about a hosted CI service / loads of browsers for testing so people dont need to go setting up or installing browsers on their server/laptop