Erik A. Hanson's Weblog

Jasmine? Jaxer?

Jasmine is a new Javascript testing framework from my pals at Pivotal Labs.

Jaxer is an Apache module that wraps Firefox’s Javascript and rendering engine, providing a server-side Javascript environment that’s fast and compatible with any JS that works in Firefox (including all kinds of DOM manipulation and libraries like Prototype, jQuery, etc.).

Running Jasmine Tests Through Jaxer

Part of an app I’m writing uses Jaxer and I wanted to write my tests in Jasmine, so I wrote a test runner and reporter to bridge the two, and then I wrote a rake task to run the tests.

So now I can run “rake spec” and my JS tests will run, in Firefox, but without having to actually have Firefox open up (or be installed).

So:

rake spec

returns:

.    foo should do something.
.    foo should do something else.
.    foo should do yet another thing.

3 of 3 specs passed

And the whole thing takes 0.37 seconds. It should be noted that those are trivial tests, but running a JS test suite with only 0.37 seconds of overhead is pretty neat.

My rake task looks like:

task :spec do
  results = `curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8081/jaxer-service/jasmine-jaxer`
  print results
  fail "spec failures" if results.match(/FAILURES!/)
end

Download

The JS code that hooks Jasmine to Jaxer is here: jasmine-jaxer.js.