Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
Harmony: Bringing together great libraries to enable awesome JS testing in Ruby
Category: JavaScript, Rails
, Ruby
, Testing
This enables you to do very cool things such as unit test JavaScript in the same area as your Ruby tests:
-
require 'test/unit'
require 'harmony'
class JavascriptTest <Test::Unit::TestCase
def setup
@page = Harmony::Page.new
@page.load('public/javascripts/foo.js')
end
def test_foo
assert_equal "world", @page.execute_js(<<-JS)
foo = new Foo;
foo.hello();
JS
end
end
and you can even use JavaScript libraries.... as script tags are autofetched:
-
require 'harmony'
page = Harmony::Page.new(<<-HTML)
<html>
<head>
<script src="javascripts/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="widget">ohaie</div>
</body>
HTML
page.execute_js("$('#widget').innerHTML") #=> "ohaie"
This library builds on the shoulders of giants, one of which is Mr. Johnson, John Barnette who I had the pleasure of working with many moons ago. He is the person I think of when I remember that the best engineers that I have worked with haven't been computer scientists, but musicians and biologists. He is also a great fun guy.
Anyway, sorry for the aside.
If you are a Rails chap, you may also be interested in the Rails plugin holygrail.
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“the best engineers that I have worked with haven’t been computer scientists, but musicians and biologists.”
So true.
This is a browser-less, console based javascript testing environment. It’s not useless but not what we normally need to test browser based applications. For most scenarios Selenium or the like are still the way to go. Furthermore it uses Mozilla’s JS engine. With Selenium we can use any JS engine.
The name is unfortunate. People familiar with JavaScript development already associate “Harmony” with the next ECMAScript version, which is supposed to unite the efforts of the ES3 and ES4 working groups.
But maybe it’s intentional; they’re joining the ranks of other confusingly named JS projects: Prototype, Closure, Scope… Me, I’m probably going to name my new project “Script”. Or maybe “Java”, that could get interesting.