(I’m still here. During my time away from the blog I got a job. Hopefully things are about to be calmer and I’ll be updating more frequently.)
I spent a while burnishing up the weighted-list javascript library I wrote last spring, in the process catching up with the latest goings-on in Javascript. I have a real love-hate relationship with Javascript the language and its software ecosystem, but that’s probably a topic for another day; for now I guess I’ll just snarkily mention hasOwnProperty() and leave it at that. In any event, the ascendency of Node.js seems to have sparked a mini-renaissance in software packages written in javascript. Things are moving pretty rapidly and there aren’t necessarily clear favorites in a lot of areas, so you wind up with a great variety of alternatives for various types of useful libraries.
The resulting competition is probably good for the overall quality of javascript open-source software, but it can be a little difficult to determine which packages are good to use right now. All of which is a lead-up to say that I’ve been spending some time looking into Javascript unit-testing frameworks.
js-weighted-list currently has a light suite of unit tests written in Qunit. Qunit seems like an adequate framework overall, and being able to run my tests in a browser is pretty convenient, but it has a few aspects I’m not crazy about: the documentation is a little thin on the ground and I’m not crazy about the actual syntax of the tests, especially for tests where I’m expecting the code under test to throw an exception. I’m also not sure that Qunit is the new hotness any longer, which is of course of paramount importance in Javascript these days.
With that in mind, I’m going to try, as an experiment, to reproduce the minimal suite of unit tests I’ve got in a few other frameworks and see which ones I prefer. The candidates I’ve got in mind so far are Mocha, Chai, BusterJS, Jasmine, and Pavlov. I’m not completely sure I’ll have the attention-span necessary to do a full-on shootout between them, but hopefully I can at least try a few out and see. The weighted-list library is currently small enough that it’s pretty easy and fast to test, and as a bonus, I will hopefully shake some bugs out of it along the way.
While I’m on the subject, another idea I’ve got is to fix up a page that will run selections thousands of times and graph the results, so that I can have some idea as the whether the library works correctly or not. But that’s another topic for a different day.
