Day 61

So, I was going to do a blog on how I set up my testing framework for JsUnit, and made a little interface to use it and all... but today I discovered ScrewUnit! After reading Corey Haines' blog on his stickies project , which was very much about testing JavaScript and all these neat ways to do TDD with it, I am now a complete convert. It is sooooooo much better than JsUnit. The error messages actually give line numbers! How weird is that?

BlueRidge and ScrewUnit are largely for Rails, but of course ScrewUnit can be used for just JS. It is an excellent framework, built up almost like RSpec, but of course the syntax is different. It is run in the browser, and you can just click on a test, or a describe block and it will run it. Very fantastical.

Since everything in JS is a object, and you can pass functions back and forth, most of the time mocking out objects is trivial. In fact, when you design your app using TDD, you can make it soooo versatile that you can just pass in functions or blocks that act as natural parameters, but can also do your test for you. Hopefully once I start my next project I will have some nice examples to show this in action.

I also learned a lot of JQuery today. How weird is it that you can get JQuery in one 6,000 line file? There are actually lots of JQuery libraries, but I just yoinked the recommended file for now. Pretty neat tool though. It will be nice not having to do a document.getElementById("") all the time, as well as making it easy to add classes to elements for easy styling. Something that will be exceedingly useful in the project I am about to start.

Speaking of which. I just estimated a new project, which is supposed to be a web app? The final nature of the program is still a bit of a mystery to me, which certainly causes issue with estimating, but it is supposed to be done nearly entirely with JavaScript. It is also a fairly large application. Not super complicated, it just has a lot of pages. This is why I wanted to learn a lot about ScrewUnit and JQuery, so that when I started working on this project I wouldn't do it page by page, but I would have the ability to create templates. It could take ages to finish if I had to design each page anew (there are actually a huge variety of them), but if I can get some really useful objects, then I am pretty sure I can start cruising!

Also, my classes are starting to become a pain now. Which is unfortunate. I have somewhat neglected them recently due to my apprenticeship challenges, and now it is coming back to haunt me!