11/30/2015

Testing React Components With Jasmine

Making a React component feels straight forward. Testing a React component should feel just as straight forward. Now that I have built tests for my React code, I can say it is.

11/02/2015

Making Your First React Component Raise Events and Update (update to v0.14.x)

My last article described creating a simple React component. This post will walk through adding a click event to that component. The click event will modify the data the component is displaying. React will automatically update the screen without us making any explicit requests based on the change in data.

10/02/2015

Making Your First React Component (updated to v0.14.x)

Update: Fixed example with 0.14.x ReactDom format and to use states, not props.

In a world of Angulars and Embers, what is the point of a library that only provides a third of the MVC equation? React offers simplicity and a welcome decoupling of display and business logic.

6/23/2015

Tweak the Angular Test By Controlling the Template

We recently finished bringing our test coverage up to 90%+ on our Angular project. The team worked hard and I am proud of our accomplishments. Going forward we are using TDD and this has proven to be an interesting experience that has provided new challenges. We have found building Angular directives through test driven development to be a little challenging since the templates haven't been built yet. We aren't going to know what to build right away, and we are loathe to break our rhythm and constantly be updating a template file. A bigger problem is the template creating an external dependency which is never a good thing for unit tests. When it comes time to do e2e testing and using Selenium or Protractor then the whole template needs to be run. If I'm starting with unit tests to define my code, how can I use a template without these problems? We found one method that we like - the $templateCache.

4/06/2015

Look! No Hands! - Using Selenium and Node.js for interactive UI testing

Selenium is the most talked about UI testing framework that I could find that was both open source and well supported. We decided to adopt it for our automated UI testing. I have found it to be very useful, albeit with a stiff learning curve. One downside for me is the back and forth between building tests and then waiting for Selenium and the browsers to open and run the tests. It occurred to me I could help alleviate this by having the browsers at the ready and eagerly waiting for the command to start testing. So I reached into my toolbox to grab one of my favorite tools, Node.js. Using Node.js I was able to build an interactive interface with which I can iteratively build my front end tests. Everything I needed was already there, I just had to put pieces together.