“I’m pleased to announce the third alpha release of TestSimple, the port of Test::Builder, Test::Simple, and Test::More to JavaScript. You can download it here. This release has the following changes:

• Removed trailing commas from 3 arrays, since IE6/Win doesn’t like them. And now everything works in IE. Thanks to Marshall Roch for tracking down and nailing this problem.

• isNum() and isntNum() in TestBuilder.js now properly convert values to numbers using the global Number() function.

• CurrentTest is now properly initialized to 0 when creating a new TestBuilder object.

• Values passed to like() and unlike() that are not strings now always fail to match the regular expression.

• plan() now outputs better error messages.

• isDeeply() now works better with circular and repeating references.

• diag() is now smarter about converting objects to strings before outputting them.

• Changed isEq() and isntEq() to use simple equivalence checks (== and !=, respectively) instead of stringified comparisons, as the equivalence checks are more generally useful. Use cmpOk(got, "eq", expect) to explicitly compare stringified versions of values.

• TestBuilder.create() now properly returns a new TestBuilder object instead of the singleton.

• The useNumbers(), noHeader(), and noEnding() accessors will now properly assign a non-null value passed to them.

• The arrays returned from summary() and details() now have the appropriate structures.

• diag() now always properly adds a “#” character after newlines.

• Added output(), failureOutput(), todoOutput(), warnOutput(), and endOutput() to TestBuilder to set up function reference to which to send output for various purposes. The first three each default to document.write, while warnOutput() defaults to window.alert and endOutout() defaults to the appendData function of a text element inside an element with the ID “test” or, failing that, window.write.

• todo() and todoSkip() now properly add “#” after all newlines in their messages.

• Fixed line ending escapes in diagnostics to be platform-independent. Bug reported by Marshall Roch.

• Ported about a third of the tests from Test::Simple (which is how I caught most of the above issues). The remaining test from Test::Simple will be ported for the next release.

Many thanks to Marshall Roch for help debugging issues in IE.

Now, there is one outstanding issue I’d like to address before I would consider this production ready (aside from porting all the remaining tests from Test::Simple): how to harness the output. Harnessing breaks down into a number of issues:

How to run all tests in a single window. I might be able to write a build script that builds a single HTML file that includes all the other HTML files in iframes or some such. But then will each run in its own space without stomping on the others? And how would the harness pull in the results of each? It might be able to go into each of its children and grab the results from the TestBuilder objects…

More Feedback/advice/insults welcome!

Originally published on use Perl;

I’m pleased to announce the second alpha release of TestSimple, the port of Test::Builder, Test::Simple, and Test::More to JavaScript. You can download it here. This release has the following changes:

• Removed eqArray() and eqAssoc() functions from TestMore per suggestion from Michael Schwern. The problem is that these are not test functions, and so are inconsistent with the way the rest of the functions work. isDeeply() is the function that users really want.
• Changed eqSet() to isSet() and made it into a real test function.
• Implemented skip(), todoSkip(), and todo(). These are a bit different than the Perl originals originals so read the docs!
• Implemented skipAll() and BAILOUT() using exceptions and an exception handler installed in window.onerror.
• The final message of a test file now properly outputs in the proper place. Tests must be run inside an element its “id” attribute set to “test”, such as <pre id="test">. The window.onload handler will find it and append the final test information.
• Implemented skipRest() in TestBuilder and TestMore. This method is stubbed out the Perl original, but not yet implemented there!

The only truly outstanding issues I see before I would consider these “modules” ready for production use are:

• Figure out how to get at file names and line numbers for better diagnostic messages. Is this even possible in JavaScript?
• Decide where to send test output, and where to allow other output to be sent. Test::Builder clones STDERR and STDOUT for this purpose. We’ll probably have to do it by overriding document.write()>, but it’d be good to allow users to define alternate outputs (tests may not always run in a browser, eh?). Maybe we can use an output object? Currently, a browser and its DOM are expected to be present. I could really use some advice from real JavaScript gurus on this one.
• Write tests!

Feedback/advice/insults welcome!

Looking for the comments? Try the old layout.

I’m pleased to announce the second alpha release of TestSimple, the port of Test::Builder, Test::Simple, and Test::More to JavaScript. You can download it here. This release has the following changes:

• Removed eqArray() and eqAssoc() functions from TestMore per suggestion from Michael Schwern. The problem is that these are not test functions, and so are inconsistent with the way the rest of the functions work. isDeeply() is the function that users really want.

• Changed eqSet() to isSet() and made it into a real test function.

• Implemented skip(), todoSkip(), and todo(). These are a bit different than the Perl originals originals so read the docs!

• Implemented skipAll() and BAILOUT() using exceptions and an exception handler installed in window.onerror.

• The final message of a test file now properly outputs in the proper place. Tests must be run inside an element its “id” attribute set to “test”, such as <pre id="test">. The window.onload handler will find it and append the final test information.

• Implemented skipRest() in TestBuilder and TestMore. This method is stubbed out the Perl original, but not yet implemented there!

The only truly outstanding issues I see before I would consider these “modules” ready for production use are:

• Figure out how to get at file names and line numbers for better diagnostic messages. Is this even possible in JavaScript?

• Decide where to send test output, and where to allow other output to be sent. Test::Builder clones STDERR and STDOUT for this purpose. We’ll probably have to do it by overriding document.write()>, but it’d be good to allow users to define alternate outputs (tests may not always run in a browser, eh?). Maybe we can use an output object? Currently, a browser and its DOM are expected to be present. I could really use some advice from real JavaScript gurus on this one.

• Write tests!

Feedback/advice/insults welcome!

Originally published on use Perl;

I’m pleased to announce the first alpha release of my port of [Test::Simple/Test::Builder/Test::More] to JavaScript. Download it now and let me know what you think!

You can see what the tests look like by loading the files in the tests/ directory into your Web browser. This is my first stab at what I hope becomes a complete port. I could use some feedback/ideas on a number of outstanding issues:

• I have made no decisions as to where to output test results, diagnostics, etc. Currently, they’re simply output to document.write(). This may well be the best place in the long run, though it might be nice to allow users to configure where output goes. It will also be easy to control the output, since the output functions can easily be replaced in JavaScript. Suggestions welcome.

• I have no idea how to exit execution of tests other than by throwing an exception, which is only supported by JavaScript 1.5, anyway, AFAIK. As a result, skipAll(), BAILOUT(), and skipRest() do not work.

• Skip and Todo tests currently don’t work because named blocks (e.g., SKIP: and TODO:) are lexical in JavaScript. Therefore I cannot get at them from within a function called from within a block (at least not that I can tell). It might be that I need to just pass function references to skip() and todo(), instead. This is a rather different interface than that supported by Test::More, but it might work. Thoughts?

• Currently, one must call Test._ending() to finish running tests. This is because there is no END block to grab on to in JavaScript. Suggestions for how to capture output and append the output of _ending() are welcome. It might work to have the onload event execute it, but then it will have to look for the proper context in which to append it (a <pre> tag, at this point).

• Anyone have any idea how to get at the line number and file name in a JavaScript? Failures currently aren’t too descriptive. As a result, I’m not sure if level() will have any part to play.

• Is there threading in JavaScript?

• I haven’t written TestHarness yet. It may not make sense to even have such a thing in JavaScript; I’m not sure.

• I’m using a Module::Build script to build a distribution. I don’t think there’s a standard for distributing JavaScript libraries, but I think that this works reasonably well. I have all of the documentation in POD, and the script generates HTML and text versions before creating the tarball. The Build.PL script of course is not included in the distribution. I started out trying to write the documentation in JSDoc, but abandoned it for all of the reasons I recounted last week.

• Is there a way to dynamically load a JavaScript file? I’d like to use an approach to have TestMore.js and TestSimple.js load TestBuilder.js. I’d also like to use it to implement loadOk() (equivalent to Test::More’s use_ok() and require_ok() subroutines).

More details are in the ToDo section of the TestBuilder docs.

Let me know what you think!

Originally published on use Perl;