purelyjs 0.1

Testing framework for javascript

• Command line test runner with minimal hassle (only needs a javascript shell like node.js/rhino/spidermonkey - no browser).

• Small library of JUnit-style testing primitives.

Theory

The composition of a typical Javascript application tends to be a mix of library/framework code (jQuery, Backbone, Angular.js etc) and application specific code. Frameworks provide many hooks that allow the programmer to customize their behavior, which is accomplished through callbacks.

This tight coupling between the application and the framework makes it hard to unit test the application logic (the framework is generally known to work well already, that’s typically why it was chosen). Worse still, the effects of the application are manifest through side effects: network calls are made, ui components are updated etc. Many heavy weight testing frameworks have sprung up to address this need, and they are centered around driving a browser and observing the effects (Selenium, phantomjs, etc).

Application
--------------------------------------------
|                                          |
|            Callback spaghetti            |
|         Land of the side effect          |
|                                          |
--------------------------------------------
|                                          |
|               Pure code                  |
|                                          |
--------------------------------------------

Still, almost every application needs to perform some tasks that have no dependencies on network or browsers. Things like manipulating strings, numbers, dates, arrays, custom data structures, parsing text streams etc. This code is very amenable to unit testing, because it tends to be side effect free (ie. pure).

Testing purely

The basic idea behind purely is that you split out your pure code from your side-effectful code and write tests against it using the primitives purely provides. Your stack will look like this:

Stack
--------------------------------------------
|                                          |
|                  Tests                   |
|                                          |
--------------------------------------------      -----
|                                          |        |
|                purely.js                 |        |
|    assertEqual, assertNotEqual etc...    |        |
|                                          |       test
--------------------------------------------   dependencies
|                                          |        |
|                Pure code                 |        |
|                                          |        |
--------------------------------------------      -----

Since none of this code needs a browser to run, purely can run it on a javascript engine on the command line. First it will scan your test code to find all the tests. For each test it will assemble a test module as shown below (a single file containing all the code, plus the invocation of that one test) and execute it.

Test module
--------------------------------------------      -----
|                                          |        |
|                Pure code                 |        |
|                                          |       test
--------------------------------------------      module
|                                          |        |
|                purely.js                 |        |
|    assertEqual, assertNotEqual etc...    |        V
|                                          |
--------------------------------------------
|                                          |
|                  Tests                   |
|        function testThis() {...}         |
|        function testThat() {...}         |
|                                          |
--------------------------------------------
|                                          |
|               testThis();                |
|                                          |
--------------------------------------------

Usage

Run purelyjs with command line arguments:

$ purelyjs --test test/test_asserts.js
Running 10 tests on /usr/bin/js
..........

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 10 tests in 0.568s

You can also set up a purelyjs.ini file:

[purelyjs]

# will be tried in order, first to succeed will be used
interpreters =
    js
    rhino

libs =
    static/js/code.js

tests =
    static/js/test/tests.js