Book Image

RSpec Essentials

By : Mani Tadayon
Book Image

RSpec Essentials

By: Mani Tadayon

Overview of this book

This book will teach you how to use RSpec to write high-value tests for real-world code. We start with the key concepts of the unit and testability, followed by hands-on exploration of key features. From the beginning, we learn how to integrate tests into the overall development process to help create high-quality code, avoiding the dangers of testing for its own sake. We build up sample applications and their corresponding tests step by step, from simple beginnings to more sophisticated versions that include databases and external web services. We devote three chapters to web applications with rich JavaScript user interfaces, building one from the ground up using behavior-driven development (BDD) and test-driven development (TDD). The code examples are detailed enough to be realistic while simple enough to be easily understood. Testing concepts, development methodologies, and engineering tradeoffs are discussed in detail as they arise. This approach is designed to foster the reader’s ability to make well-informed decisions on their own.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
RSpec Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Why Capybara?


Capybara's GitHub page describes it as an "acceptance test framework for web applications". We'll consider acceptance test to be a synonym for integration test or end-to-end test, although subtle distinctions can be made. Therefore, we already know that we won't be writing unit tests and that we will be dealing with a web application. Implicitly, this means we'll use a web browser. Capybara itself does not control the browser, but relies on drivers. The most popular of these is called Selenium, which is used widely for testing web applications. With Selenium, we can automate a real web browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, or Microsoft Edge, using code.

Why not just use Selenium directly? This is a good question. The Selenium team provides a gem called selenium-webdriver, which provides the basic browser control capabilities we need. However, Capybara has three major benefits, which explains why almost all web application test code in Ruby uses it ...