Book Image

Test-Driven JavaScript Development

By : Ravi Kumar Gupta
Book Image

Test-Driven JavaScript Development

By: Ravi Kumar Gupta

Overview of this book

Initially, all processing used to happen on the server-side and simple output was the response to web browsers. Nowadays, there are so many JavaScript frameworks and libraries created that help readers to create charts, animations, simulations, and so on. By the time a project finishes or reaches a stable state, so much JavaScript code has already been written that changing and maintaining it further is tedious. Here comes the importance of automated testing and more specifically, developing all that code in a test-driven environment. Test-driven development is a methodology that makes testing the central part of the design process – before writing code developers decide upon the conditions that code must meet to pass a test. The end goal is to help the readers understand the importance and process of using TDD as a part of development. This book starts with the details about test-driven development, its importance, need, and benefits. Later the book introduces popular tools and frameworks like YUI, Karma, QUnit, DalekJS, JsUnit and goes on to utilize Jasmine, Mocha, Karma for advanced concepts like feature detection, server-side testing, and patterns. We are going to understand, write, and run tests, and further debug our programs. The book concludes with best practices in JavaScript testing. By the end of the book, the readers will know why they should test, how to do it most efficiently, and will have a number of versatile tests (and methods for devising new tests) to get to work immediately.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Test-Driven JavaScript Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Choosing the right tool


In all the previous chapters, we have seen so many tools and frameworks which helped us write unit tests, feature detection, and so on. There are times when one tool is not enough to cater to the needs of a project. We can typically compare these tools based on what they provide because that's what we are interested in. However, we must never overlook the learning path of a tool it may come with for the team.

Feature detection tools

You learned about Modernizr in Chapter 6, Feature Detection, which is one of the most popular feature detection libraries. But, it may vary according to the project. In a project, we may need very few tests for features. In that case, sometimes, plain, custom JavaScript code is sufficient to test the features needed.

Sometimes, there are too many rich UI present in the website that it is vital to use a feature detection library such as Modernizr.

Server-side testing tools

Most often server-side code is written using NodeJS, and it's mostly...