In my last post I gave you some basic information on JavaScript that will help you get started on the road to testing your JavaScript. Now for the JavaScript test frameworks.

JavaScript test frameworks

I did some research and there are quite a few JavaScript test frameworks out there:

So apparently there are people that are trying to solve this problem, but how do you choose between all of these frameworks?

When I want to determine the relevance of something, I go straight to search.twitter.com. I figure that if no one is talking about a JavaScript framework on Twitter or if something is getting a lot of negative comments, then it’s probably not worth looking into.

Using my completely unscientific Measure of Relevance I was able to narrow down my list of JavaScript testing frameworks to the following list:

I chose JSSpec because it uses the behavior driven development terminology that I’ve become accustomed to recently. Screw-Unit also is BDD-based but it didn’t seem to be as straight-forward. QUnit is a newer framework that was originally designed by the jQuery folks as a framework for testing jQuery. I used QUnit on a real project for a client and it got the job done. QUnit seems to be the most talked about of the frameworks just because people find it when their on the jQuery site. (FWIW, QUnit doesn’t have any integration with jQuery that makes it any easier to use than the others.) YUI Test is used with the Yahoo UI framework, so if you’re using the YUI framework, YUI Test may be a good fit for you. People that use YUI Test seem to have a lot of good things to say about it.

JavaScript mocking frameworks

JavaScript mocking frameworks are not as prevalent, partly because it’s really easy in JavaScript to redefine any method in any class to be whatever you want, so you don’t need a mocking framework to redefine methods. But it’s still nice to have a framework that lets you verify that certain methods were called. If you want to look into mocking frameworks, Jack is a good place to start. It’s still in alpha (at the time of this post) but it looks usable to me. It integrates with JSSpec which is another plus.

Next up: writing testable JavaScript.