javascript style / unit testing / etc

[Jesse Kuhnert <jk...@gmail.com>]

If everyone else is in agreement I'd like to start instituting some policies
with our javascript code similar to what we do with Java.

-) Now that we have a unit testing infrastructure in place for js it would
be nice if all logic that is possible to be tested was. Obviously there is a
lot of code sitting in there that didn't have the luxury of a unit test
environment, but any new code / refactoring of js should include
complimentary unit tests.

-) When possible, it should probably generally be considered ~better~ to
have a common generic function sitting in a .js file rather than creating
whole function() blocks in our .script included files. This will reduce
response size on requests as well as make the code easier to test.

-) Until we can create our own guide or some other similar construct it
would be a good idea to try and follow
http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/js_style_guide.html for our script code to give
it a uniform style. (I still need to re-read this guide myself :) )

I've picked up a few tricks / styling habits on some other projects that
should hopefully also serve as a good reference as I start to add more /
refactor existing code. The unit tests can't handle ~everything~ currently,
but can still do a lot. It wouldn't be very hard at all to add a sort of
"Mock" object capability in there if we need it. I'll probably be playing
with this a lot more over the coming weeks. The ant jar I threw in there
also uses mozilla rhino apis directly, so if we need more functionality in
the runtime of our unit tests to make things easier it's possible to do. (so
long as we don't go ~too~ far with it...don't want to try implementing a
headless browser or anything)

Of course I would love to see a set of selenium tests incporated as well,
similar to what Andy started for tacos. Hopefully the TimeTracker app can be
our integration test for this?
--
Jesse Kuhnert
Tacos/Tapestry, team member/developer

Open source based consulting work centered around
dojo/tapestry/tacos/hivemind.