Yafumato Development Log

Put Me to the Test

April 5, 2006 on 9:57 pm | In Testing |

I’ve completed development of the next Yafumato build, 0.6 aka Kidd. I am currently testing it and plan on releasing it on April 7th. I generally like to test a release for about a week before releasing it. This release is particularly tricky, though, because it is much more complex. Kidd has about twice as much JavaScript code as 0.5, and it is now particularly vulnerable to browser-specific problems (more on that later).

I’ve been using junit for unit testing Yafumato’s Java code since the beginning. It was especially helpful when developing the utilities that perform the grunt work in Yafumato, such as managing properties and database connections. As useful as junit is, debugging Java code is much, much easier than debugging JavaScript code. Fortunately, I discovered script.aculo.us.

script.aculo.us is a Prototype-based JavaScript library. I was originally interested in script.aculo.us for the visual effects, but script.aculo.us also includes a JavaScript unit testing framework; what was originally a neat toy has become an invaluable tool. Since JavaScript is an interpreted language, there’s no compiler to catch typos. A typo that would be caught by the compiler in Java can cause totally non-deterministic behavior in JavaScript. The script.aculo.us unit test framework has become indispensable for my JavaScript testing, especially since the code is still maturing.