Heading off to our satellite office in Provo, UT this morning. Was supposed to leave last night, but the rain in Atlanta pretty much solved that mystery, so it all got shifted around a day. Will be flying back to family arriving at the house, and as soon as they leave, I leave again for Asheville, for a music and worship conference. Busy, busy, busy.
But, it will give me a chance to take a closer look at HttpUnit and JsUnit. Both are part of the xUnit family, but are targetted at Html and Javascript. I had an interesting discussion on the TDD mailing list with a gentleman who believes that the right tool still isn’t out there for regression testing of web pages, because he could have complex Javascript that a change to some baseline would cause something to fail 5 or 6 clicks in. He is also, I think, interacting with a website over which he has no control.
My position is that, as I showed in my Code Camp presentation, it is possible to put everything under test, and with that, you don’t need some browser automation tool. All you need to do is run your tests, and that will tell you if it failed.
So, over the next week or so, I am going to work on a way to prove myself right (hopefully). I truly believe it is going to be a pain to do, but if I can get an entire interaction under test, including ASP.NET, HTML, and Javascript, it will be a lot closer to the tool he was looking for.
Of course, I also have to begin work on the J2ME pages for my current project at work. My goal there is also to develop a testing wrapper for those. Should be a little more interesting because of the limited memory space we have to work with on the phones. This limited memory means that I’ll have to eventually factor performance into the whole thing. But, since Unit Testing is all about being able to refactor confidently, I’m looking forward to how it all comes out.