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

Summary


Our primary objective is to write cross-browser code for our websites. In order to develop code that works on all major browsers, we need to detect support for features we are going to use. Thus, feature detection becomes a very critical part of a software development when it comes to develop a uniform UI. JavaScript libraries such as Modernizr help detecting features neatly. In this chapter, you learned how to use Modernizr to detect various CSS and HTML5 features. You learned about some useful API functions of Modernizr, which help us test features and extend Modernizr further for detecting features that are not yet supported by Modernizr.

You also learned about browser detection and feature detection and why browser detection is discouraged. On the other hand, you learned that there are still some features left which are called undetectable features.

In the next chapters, you will learn about observer pattern and its implementation to help you develop systems.