Development with Python

2. Purely because it features the

NyanCat

test runner.

Not so in the JavaScript world! We use YUI at work, but I thought I’d go out and see

whether there were any new tools out there. I was overwhelmed with options—jsUnit,

Qunit, Mocha, Chutzpah, Karma, Testacular, Jasmine, and many more. And it doesn’t

end there either: as I had almost settled on one of them, Mocha,

I find out that I now

need to choose an

assertion framework

and a

reporter

, and maybe a

mocking library

, and

it never ends!

In the end I decided we should use

QUnit

because it’s simple, and it works well with

jQuery.

Make a directory called

tests

inside

lists/static

, and download the Qunit JavaScript and

CSS files into it, stripping out version numbers if necessary (I got version 1.12). We’ll

also put a file called

tests.html

in there:

tree lists/static/tests/

lists/static/tests/

├── qunit.css

├── qunit.js

└── tests.html

The boilerplate for a QUnit HTML file looks like this, including a smoke test:

lists/static/tests/tests.html.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<meta

charset=

"utf-8"

<title>

Javascript tests

</title>

<link

rel=

"stylesheet"

href=

"qunit.css"

</head>

<body>

<div

id=

"qunit"

></div>

<div

id=

"qunit-fixture"

></div>

<script

src=

"qunit.js"

></script>

<script>

/*global $, test, equal */

test

(

"smoke test"

function

() {

equal

(

"Maths works!"

);

});

</script>

</body>

</html>

Dissecting that, the important things to pick up are the fact that we pull in

qunit.js

using

the first

tag, and then use the second one to write the main body of tests.

Setting Up a Basic JavaScript Test Runner

227