Learning Backbone.js Testing [Video] by Jonathan Freeman

1 hour and 48 minutes | Tuesday, August 25, 2015 | Video: AVC (.mp4) 1280x720 25fps | Audio: AAC 48KHz 2ch | 370 MB

Genre: eLearning | Language: English | With: Code Files

If you have a solid understanding of JavaScript, experience writing frontend code using Backbone.js and want to start with testing your app, this course is perfect for you. Having knowledge of the node package management ecosystem will be beneficial, although not compulsory.

About This Book

Learn to set up an optimized automated testing environment to reduce manual testing woes and lower the barrier to entry

Use and customize a breadth of common testing tools to prepare you for real-world scenarios

Implement the testing techniques on a Backbone.js application to build experience and increase comfort while testing

Table of Contents

GETTING STARTED WITH TESTING

UNDERSTANDING JASMINE

TESTING MODELS

AUTOMATING THE PROCESS

DEPENDING ON AJAX

TESTING VIEWS

TESTING ROUTERS

What You Will Learn

Understand the philosophy behind test-driven and behavior-driven development

Acquire a handful of tools and helpers to facilitate testing JavaScript applications

Overcome the obstacle of testing code that relies on AJAX by using sinon.js

Eliminate tedious manual testing habits in favor of streamlined automated workflows by using Karma

Develop a solid approach to behavior-driven development with Jasmine that will help you write better tests

Build and use fixtures to facilitate predictable data instantiation and reuse

Customize and extend the testing framework to bring the tools closer to your problem set

In Detail

The dynamic nature and flexibility of JavaScript and Backbone.js includes many ways of expressing ideas. Such liberty gives way to certain risks that aren’t as prominent in strongly typed languages and highly opinionated libraries and frameworks. Learning how to mitigate these risks is a crucial step to writing smarter software, and smarter software makes for happy developers!

Learning Backbone.js Testing will bootstrap you into a world of JavaScript testing and provide you with fundamental experience in writing tests. By understanding and becoming comfortable in testing Backbone.js applications, you can increase your productivity, code quality, and design skills.

At the beginning, we’ll discuss different testing philosophies and go over some testing basics. After establishing a motivation for and philosophy of testing, we’re going to dive right into how we express our tests in Jasmine’s BDD syntax. We’ll also hone in on how to deal with the DOM and AJAX in our tests.

Once you learn some syntax and apply it to plain JavaScript and Backbone.js code, we’re going to run into the problem of manual testing practices. We’ll discuss and incorporate a tool that will automate our tests and make testing considerably more streamlined using Karma. From there, you’ll learn to apply testing techniques and tools such as fixtures and spies. This course will jump-start your automated testing experience and you’ll be writing robust tests for everyday objects!

Style and Approach

This course relies heavily on live-coding and practical examples to facilitate the learning process. By the end of the course, we’ll have a partially functional app and a final hands-on challenge to complete and customize the app.

Authors

Jonathan Freeman

Jonathan Freeman is a jazz saxophone player and home cook, and loves to solve problems with code. He wrote his first production application 12 years ago and has been working with Backbone.js in production for the past 3 years. From writing articles for InfoWorld to presenting at conferences and user groups, he loves to teach and jumps at the opportunity to facilitate and observe learning. He’s currently interested in complex event processing with rules engines, constraint-based optimization problems, and the fast-moving DevOps ecosystem.