Testality is a local testing platform for web developers. Its goals are to manage the other things in the process of test driven development and front-end testing so that the developer is free to use their time and thought focused on the problem at hand.

This is a prototype of the final project, it needs a lot more error handling before this is a real life version. Feel free to help out.

It is currently written in Ruby for ease of installation in a development environment due to the fact that many other front-end tools exist in Ruby. If you have better ideas or arguments for language selection let me know.

Installing

To install, checkout the source and install the gem in the root directory:

gem install testality

To start up Testality simply run:

testality

It will serve all JavaScript files contained within the current directory.

Configuration

You can specify the directories and files to serve:

testality path/to/src,path/to/tests

You can also specify the port for running and monitoring the tests:

testality -p 9191

And the port that the monitoring interface receives updates on:

testality -m 9292

Todo

• To add the gem to the repository when ready.
• Redesign hook in to allow ordering of the resources based upon dependency, ideally this responsibility could be externalized. Ideally also individual files should be included separately to assist the stack trace.

Explore integration with:

• QUnit
• JSUnit
• Sprockets
• RequireJS
• YUI

Expansion

Visual testing memos

Hash the current fileset, when the browser is refreshed it reports this hash to the test platform. When a new hash is created all the browsers that have been connected are reported as stale. When they are refreshed to test this is then flagged green.

Server-side cross-platform testing

This would allow live compilation and running of server side source code and tests for local development. It would be kept separate from the code repository, this is the domain of CI tools. The build step might be costly in terms of time for each modification, it might involve dynamic interpretation of typically compiled files, otherwise developers will need to keep their builds small and efficient. Needless to say this is a separate project on its own.