[LRUG] Fwd: Testing JS in Rails 4

[James Coglan]

On 31 July 2013 16:07, Will Tomlins <will at tomlins.org.uk> wrote:

> Just a thought, but have you considered making use of node?  I've had some
> success unit testing using jasmine with grunt-contrib-jasmine (
> https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-jasmine) but using PhantomJS as
> a test runtime.
>

Yes. Not those exact tools, but yes. I actually maintain my own test
framework that runs on Node (and lots of other platforms), and my current
concat/minify build tool is written in Node, mostly so I can use the Uglify
scripting API to make it build working source maps.

I'm still of the opinion that JS test suites should consist only of static
files, because of my experience trying to get test suites to run across a
ton of different platforms. So relying on a server, be it Rails or Node, is
out.

<rant> Stuff like grunt-contrib-jasmine is exactly what I was referring to
with "weird opaque and brittle glue libraries". They always tend to couple
one test framework very tightly to one target platform (in this case
Jasmine to PhantomJS, and both of these to Grunt), mix in a bunch of
unrelated concerns so so that you can't handle those concerns yourself (see
all the options this lib supports) and don't expose their functionality in
a generically useful way (such as hiding a ton of functionality behind an
interface you can only use through Grunt). Given the combinatorial
explosion of JS frameworks and runtimes, these tools make it hard to run
your tests on a variety of platforms, encourage you to couple your tests to
them, mask portability problems in the underlying tools with brittle glue,
and fail as soon as you have a use case the author didn't think of, which
happens a lot, at which point you need to disentangle your tests from the
tool and migrate to some other thing. </rant>
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