If you dread the business of testing JavaScript and Backbone.js web applications, this book is your guardian angel. In easy stages and lots of examples it takes you through the whole testing situation, introducing you to best practice and current techniques.
Overview
- Create comprehensive test infrastructures
- Understand and utilize modern frontend testing techniques and libraries
- Use mocks, spies, and fakes to effortlessly test and observe complex Backbone.js application behavior
- Automate tests to run from the command line, shell, or practically anywhere
In Detail
Frontend web applications are soaring in popularity and the Backbone.js library is leading this charge with a modular, lightweight approach for organizing JavaScript web applications. At the same time, testing client-side JavaScript and Backbone.js programs remains a difficult and tedious undertaking.
Backbone.js Testing brings sensible practices and current techniques to the challenges of Backbone.js test development. The book introduces fundamental testing concepts, comprehensive test infrastructure design, and practical exercises to easily and systematically test modern JavaScript web applications.
The book progresses from Mocha test suites and Chai assertions to advanced test mocks and stubs with Sinon.JS. The requisite libraries and utilities are introduced with in-depth examples and best practices for integration with your applications. The book guides you through the test planning and implementation processes for your application models, views, routers, and other Backbone.js components.
Backbone.js Testing gives you the tools, examples, and assistance to test your Backbone.js web applications thoroughly, quickly, and with confidence.
What you will learn from this book
- Install and set up a test infrastructure for Backbone applications
- Run, examine, and understand Mocha test reports
- Tour the Chai assertion library API with detailed examples
- Write test suites and specs with the Mocha test framework
- Fake application behavior in tests using Sinon.JS mocks, spies, and fake servers
Approach
This book is packed with step-by-step tutorials and instructions in recipe format to help you create test infrastructures and gradually advance your Backbone.js application development and testing skills.
Who this book is written for
If you are a JavaScript developer looking to create and implement test support for your Backbone.js applications, then this book is ideal for you.
Ryan Roemer
Ryan Roemer is the Director of Engineering at Curiosity Media, a language learning startup, where he manages technical operations and leads the development team. He develops (and tests) full-stack JavaScript applications and backend Node.js services. He also works with data mining, cloud architectures, and problems related to large scale distributed systems.
He was previously an engineer in the cloud computing storage group of Microsoft's Azure platform and most recently developed the search and cloud architecture for IP Street, a patent data mining startup. Besides engineering, he is a registered patent attorney (inactive), although it has been a long time since he has put on his lawyer hat.
You can find him online at
http://loose-bits.com and on Twitter at
https://twitter.com/ryan_roemer.
