[WebODF] RFC: Move to a standard JS test framework (e.g., jasmine)

Philip Peitsch P.Peitsch at qsrinternational.com
Mon Sep 15 04:45:21 CEST 2014


Hi everyone,

In an effort to ease some of the cross-browser development aspects, I’m spending
some time getting the karma test runner work that Jos started a while ago
functional again.

This migration is somewhat trickier than it should be, mainly because WebODF has
a completely custom test framework (core.UnitTester). 

This means that:
* all karma integration must be written from scratch
* it is difficult to run individual tests from karma (very handy when developing
  from WebStorm)
* text reporting from karma is *very* messy
* missing shiny features from other test frameworks :'(

I was wondering if anyone would have complaints about ripping out the custom
framework and replacing with an existing, widely used one (e.g., Jasmine,
http://jasmine.github.io/2.0/introduction.html)?

The only reason I suggest Jasmine is that I'm familiar with it's features from
other projects I work on.

Key benefits of switching to Jasmine (probably apply to other frameworks too!):
* already has integration for karma via the karma-jasmine plugin
* individual tests can be ignored or run directly from any IDE with karma support
* has a host of existing addins (e.g., better HTML reporters) which means we can
  easily improve the usability of the test results from the browser as well as in the
  qtjsruntimetests (which currently spit out raw html in the console :-/)
* good documentation
* support for async tests
* easier fixture creation

>From what I can tell, everything implemented in the existing custom test framework
is supported (or supportable without much work) in jasmine without too much work.

I'm happy to do the work... just wanted to get wider approval before spending time
on such a patch :-).

So… any objections?

Cheers,

Philip


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