Karl O'Keeffe

In a previous post I detailed changes I made to add Growl for Windows support to Autotest Growl.

These changes have now been integrated back into the autotest-growl gem. Along with some major improvements to the analysis of test results, and the details in the notifications. Thanks to Svoop, the creator of autotest-growl.

This gem isn’t yet available on Rubyforge, but you can grab a copy from my fork on GitHub until it is:

gem install karl-autotest-growl --source http://gems.github.com

This should be a drop in replacement for the previous version of karl-autotest-growl, the only thing you should notice more detail from the growl notifications!

I’ll post again once the official gem is available on Rubyforge.

I previously posted an update that enables Growl notifications for Autotest in Windows.

Which is nice, but what about other Ruby programs, they might want to send Growl notifications too. To this end Vision Media have produced a Ruby Growl gem which makes it easy for any Ruby program to send Growl notifications.

But the visionmedia-growl gem only works on OSX.

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In a previous blog post I detailed how to get Autotest Growl notifications on Windows using Snarl. But, there now exists an official Growl client for Windows.

So how about we update autotest-growl to support Windows (on top of it’s existing support for OSX).

If you don’t want to know all the gory details, you can just install my fork of the autotest-growl gem, that includes native Growl Windows support:

gem install karl-autotest-growl --source http://gems.github.com

Obviously, you’ll need to have Growl for Windows installed as well!

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I’ve made a small update to the QUnit Adapter for JS Test Driver.

This fixes a bug where the ok() assertion was much stricter than the qunit equivalent. It was only succeeding when passed a boolean true value.

Now it behaves the same as the qunit version, and succeeds with all values other than 0, false, or null.

You can get the new 1.0.1 verison of the QUnit Adapter from Google Code.

As part of my experimenting with JS Test Driver, I have been porting over a suite of about 300 existing tests.

Some of these tests deal with time based logic, such as delayed callbacks or time limited user interaction. Currently these tests are run in a HTML page using qunit.

To deal with the time based logic I use the jsUnit’s Mock Timeout. See Simulating Time in jsUnit Tests on the Google Testing Blog.

jsUnit’s Mock Timeout overrides the built in setTimeout, clearTimeout, setInterval, and clearInterval methods, and provides a Clock object that allows you to control the passage of time.

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In my last post I introduced a QUnit to JS Test Driver adapter, a small adapter which converts QUnit tests into native JS Test Driver tests.

This adapter is now part of the JS Test Driver project.

There is now a QUnit Adapter wiki page on the JS Test Driver project site. This will be updated to keep up with any changes to the adapter.

The code is now stored within the JS Test Driver subversion repository. You can always download the latest version of the QUnit Adapter using the Google Code web interface.

Thanks to Jeremie Lenfant-engelmann for deeming QUnit Adapter worthy of official regonition :)

In my previous post on QUnit and JS Test Driver I showed how to run your qunit tests with JS Test Driver.

The technique used was to run the tests with qunit, and report either their success or failure to JS Test Driver. This works, but you miss out on the important feedback of exactly which assertions have failed, and why.

This problem has led me to taking a new approach to running qunit tests with JS Test Driver, where I don’t use any of the existing qunit code, and instead just create an interface wrapper that converts qunit style tests and assertions directly into JS Test Driver tests and assertions.

This gives assertion level error reporting, making it much easier to write and debug tests. Essentially this adapter allows you to write native JS Test Driver tests, but using the less verbose qunit syntax.

The new approach also means that qunit lifecycles (setup and teardown) work.

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I was very impressed by the new Google JS Test Driver project, which provides a blisteringly fast, and easily automated way of running your Javascript unit tests. See this introduction to JS Test Driver by Miško Hevery for a great overview.

I previously described how to run JS Test Driver automatically with Autotest.

But I have an existing project that uses the jQuery testing framework qunit for testing. I didn’t really fancy rewriting 300+ tests just so I could use the JS Test Driver framework.

So I wrote a converter that automatically converts qunit modules and tests into JS Test Driver TestCases and test methods.

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Growl and Autotest work brilliantly together. Autotest runs all your tests in the background every time a file changes, giving you extremely fast feedback on your test driven development. And Growl notifications save you from needing to flip back to the Terminal to see the result of each test run, you get an unobtrusive popup in the corner of your screen showing the success or failure of the tests.

But what about those users working on the Windows platform?

Snarl is a windows counterpart to Growl. Providing much of the same functionality.

And there is a Snarl Ruby gem allowing us to create Snarl notifications from Ruby.

So lets convert our Growl calls to Snarl calls, and get Autotest notifications under Windows.

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Google recently released a new Javascript testing framework, JS Test Driver. It provides incredibly fast execution for Javascript unit tests, and can be run from the command line without the need for manual control of browsers. Check out this introduction to JS Test Driver by Miško Hevery.

Fast test execution and the ability to be run from the command line make it a perfect fit to integrate into the Autotest test cycle. So I have.

The module below hooks into Autotest just before the normal tests are run. It runs JS Test Driver over all the tests in the project, outputs the results, and finally fires off a :ran_js_test_driver hook.

Errors and failed tests will automatically be notified through Growl (if Growl and autotest-growl are installed). By default successful tests runs are not notified through Growl, in order to keep distracting popups to a minimum.

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