14 September 2006
RailsConf: Adventures in JavaScript testing by Thomas Fuchs

I’m currently sitting in the main congress hall awaiting the start of Thomas Fuch’s presentation. As I’m sure many readers of my blog are aware, I’m a huge advocate of testing, or to be specific, good testing. However, one thing that I’ve never managed to get into is unit testing with JavaScript. I’ve never really been aware of the tools available or how well it works.

I’m going to write this post live; hopefully it won’t just come across as a mish-mash of incoherent ramblings.

  • Traditional JavaScript “testing” generally revolves around alert. it can be useful sometimes but it generally doesn’t offer anything interesting. Use it sparingly.
  • There are many common misconceptions or attitudes towards JavaScript: “we don’t need tests for 10 lines of code”; “but you can’t debug JavaScript”. Wrong and wrong again. Enter unit testing for JavaScript.
  • Some options exist already, such as jsunit. These have their problems, such as awkward syntax or problems with Prototype.
  • Scriptaculous has its own unittest.js library. All you need to do is include the unittest.js file and an empty div with a “testlog” HTML ID (defaults). Now you’re ready to roll with Test.Unit.Runner.
  • Test.Unit.Runner looks quite similar to the standard xUnit family of testing libraries. It has the standard setup and teardown methods and a suite of assertions.
  • It has some good testing functionality for dealing with effects, and time-sensitive behaviour (wait function).
  • It has a basic benchmarking system too!
  • Rake integration is provided through a the javascript_test plugin – it allows you to launch browsers and run your javascript unit tests through a single command: rake test:javascripts. It uses a WEBrick server and supports multiple browsers, including Camino, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. It’s fairly trivial to add support for other browsers too. It seems to be missing the functionality to close the browser after the rake test run. Perhaps the browser definition classes could be extended to support a “close” method that is called after the test run?
  • The plugin also provides a generator for generating test stub files (HTML format) in test/javascript.
  • Did I mention the browser-based test runner looks pretty sweet?
  • OK, here’s the killer feature so far: RSpec-style syntax, including should* style expectations and context/spec format. I’m convinced, sign me up!
  • Some other hints and tips: If you aren’t using Firebug already, then start using it! It is awesome and makes debugging AJAX and general JavaScript problems a lot easier. (as an aside, its also great for debugging your behaviours when you are using UJS). There is also a tool for Safari called Drosera.
  • Don’t forget your RJS templates either. RJS has some basic debugging support built-in (although this could really do with being expanded upon).

During the question and answer session, Simon Willison mentioned a tool that was part of the Dojo Toolkit that uses a command-line JavaScript interpreter to run its unit tests. It sounds interesting although I feel its a lot more useful to run the tests in the actual environment they are going to run in (i.e. the browsers). By introducing something like a separate interpreter that end-users aren’t going to be using, you are relying on that interpreter being correct.

All in all, it was a good talk and has really got me interested in unit testing with JavaScript. It’s definately something I should be doing, especially as I am so strict about testing with the rest of my code.

Finally, a word of warning for those who want to try a bit of live blogging: IRC is evil and distracting. Use with caution!

Links and useful information:

Last updated on 27 Jun 2008 at 16:06 by luke. Filed Under: Development, RailsConf 2006.

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4 Comments on this article

1. Comment by James Mead on 14 Sep 2006 at 16:09

You should also watch Does my button look big in this? Building testable AJAX applications by Adam Connors & Joe Walnes.

2. Comment by Luke Redpath on 14 Sep 2006 at 16:09

Cheers for the link James. I’ll be sure to check it out.

I’d like to see more moves towards making things like Selenium even easier to use with Rails, as its the best way to truly functionally test your app (including JS/AJAX end to end). Watir would be nice too but until it has Firefox/Safari support I can’t really use it.

3. Comment by Patrick Cambre on 09 Nov 2006 at 23:11

Hello Sir Luke,

I have been experimenting with different kinds of javascripts, with good results. I am about to put up a new look for my homepage, but I am stuck a little on this particular javascript. The script is at…

http://draftwebpage.4t.com/example-complete.html

Please do take a look at it my friend. What I want to do is this…

I am trying to put two scripts on the same webpage. One scripts works fine, as you can see at the website address I gave you. But I seem to have trouble getting two scripts to work on the same page.

My website conist of myself and a friend named Sir Pedro. I want to use that javascript with his projects…and then use the same script by listing my projects…all on the same webpage.

Should you understand these codes better then I, please do respon my dear friend. Any help in this will continue my goal…into giving my website, that professional look!

a friend, Patrick

P.S. I want to thank you for the time for reading my concerns…thank you!

4. Comment by Yan on 11 Nov 2006 at 15:11

JsUnit has problem with Prototype? Can you be a bit more specific? Thanks in advance.

Yan

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