Book Image

Jasmine JavaScript Testing

By : Paulo Ragonha
Book Image

Jasmine JavaScript Testing

By: Paulo Ragonha

Overview of this book

<p>From a little renegade scripting language to the de facto standard platform of today, JavaScript has become a universal language available in the widest range of devices; it is truly the 'write once, run everywhere’ language. However, as JavaScript applications become more complicated, testing and applying sustainable software engineering practices also become mandatory.</p> <p>Jasmine JavaScript Testing is a practical guide to a more sustainable JavaScript development process. You will learn by example how to drive the development of a web application using tests and best practices.</p> <p>This book is about becoming a better JavaScript developer. So, throughout the chapters, you will not only learn about writing tests, but also about the best practices for writing software in the JavaScript language. This book is about acknowledging JavaScript as a real platform for application development and leveraging all of its potential. You will also learn about tooling and automation and how to make your life easier and more productive.</p> <p>You will learn how to create a sustainable codebase with the help of Jasmine. We will take a look at integrated testing (with a backend NodeJS server) and how you can speed this process up by faking AJAX requests. As you progress through the book, you will learn about the challenges of testing an application built on top of a framework and how you can prevent your application from suffering from dependency management hell. Also, since your applications need to get into production, you will learn about optimizing the code to reduce the number of requests the browser needs to make while loading your application.</p> <p>With this book, you will learn everything you need to know to become a real professional in the ever-demanding JavaScript universe.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Chapter 8. Build Automation

We have seen how to create an application from the ground up using tests with Jasmine. But as the application grows and the numbers of files starts to increase, managing the dependencies between them can became a little difficult.

For instance, we have a dependency between the Investment and the Stock models, and they must be loaded in a proper order to work. So we do what we can; we order the loading of the scripts so that the Stock is available once the Investment is loaded:

<script type="text/javascript" src="src/Stock.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="src/Investment.js"></script>

But that soon can become cumbersome and unmanageable.

Another problem is the number of requests the application uses to load all of its files. Up until now it is 13 different files, so 13 requests.

So we have here a paradox; although it is good for code maintainability to break it in small modules, it is bad for the client performance, where a single...