2015

Starting a NodeJS Project - Testing

buildsystems

I try to be a bit of a stickler when it comes to testing of my code. As such, I always like to make sure that I have support for Unit Testing in my projects from the very start, knowing full well that if not then the test quality just won’t be as good and the project will suffer as a result.

Testing of a project comes in various different flavours, of various different levels of importance.

  • Unit Testing. This is testing every single Unit - Module in NodeJS terms - of a project in complete isolation. Everything that the module depends on should be replaced with Mocks that you have control over, so that you know exactly what is going on.
  • Integration Testing. This is testing a group of units all together to make sure that the inter-operation between them is correct. The level that you do this at completely depends on the tests that you are doing. It might be simple testing 2 or 3 modules together, or it might be testing a full stack from API all the way down to a (mock) database. The key difference is that it is not testing one Unit in isolation, but testing the integration of several Units together, but isolated from everything outside of that set of Units
  • Verification Testing. This is a less commonly used term, but it’s one that I use to mean testing of the entire project as a whole. It’s essentially Integration Testing, but where the collection of Units that you are Integration Testing is “all of them”. This can be very hard to get right, because ideally you need to test against a real database engine, and using a real browser. Often it’s just easier to do this level of testing by hand, but if you can automate it then you really should.

Read More

Starting a NodeJS Project - ES6

buildsystems

In the previous post, I set up a new NPM project to work with, and added in Grunt as a task runner so that we can do complex tasks if we want to. Next is setting it up to build ES6 code into ES5 via Babel, so that we get to use the newer features - Classes, Arrow Functions, Destructuring, Let/Const, and so on - whilst running on a runtime that doesn’t yet support them - because no runtime yet supports ES6 fully.

Babel is a Transpiler that we can use to automatically convert ES6 code into ES5 code for exactly this purpose. It literally takes existing ES6 source code as input, and converts it into ES5 source code as output - in the same way that a compiler would covert source code into machine code.

If we so desired, we could use the exact same setup for working with CoffeeScript, Dart, TypeScript, or any of a growing set of languages that we can convert into Javascript.

Read More

Starting a NodeJS Project - Project Setup

buildsystems

Whenever I start a new project using NodeJS, there are several things that I always do first. I thought that I’d finally get around to writing up what these things are, so that I can reference it myself, and in case anyone else might be interested. This covers part one of this writeup, setting up a base Node project, and adding Grunt in to it so that we can use Grunt as a task runner for more complicated builds. Next post will cover setting up the build so that we can write our code in ES6 instead, and later we will look at setting up some static analysis to keep code quality highter.

Read More