DailyJS

Node Roundup

29 Dec 2010 | By Alex Young | Tags node server

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Tobi

Tobi (GitHub: LearnBoost / tobi, MIT license) is yet another project by TJ Holowaychuk and Guillermo Rauch from LearnBoost for server-side browser-based testing, in a similar vein to Webrat. Tobi uses jQuery and jsdom to make writing tests intuitive for us seasoned JavaScripters.

TJ’s example demonstrates using jQuery’s selectors and the kind of chained API we’re now familiar with:

var tobi = require('tobi'),
    app = require('./my/app'),
    browser = tobi.createBrowser(app);

browser.get('/login', function(res, $) {
  $('form')
    .fill({ username: 'tj', password: 'tobi' })
    .submit(function(res, $) {
      res.should.have.status(200);
      res.should.have.header('Content-Length');
      res.should.have.header('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=utf-8');
      $('ul.messages').should.have.one('li', 'Successfully authenticated');
      browser.get('/login', function(res, $) {
        res.should.have.status(200);
        $('ul.messages').should.have.one('li', 'Already authenticated');
        // We are finished testing, close the server
        app.close();
      });
    });
});

Tobi is actually test framework agnostic, and they’ve added hooks for TJ’s should.js assertion library (used in the example). That means the syntax for writing assertions is expressive and succinct.

Because this project is test framework (or test runner) agnostic, Tobi could be used with something like Expresso to run the tests. This is an example of using should.js with Expresso:

var lib = require('mylib'),
    should = require('should');

module.exports = {
  'test .version': function() {
    lib.version.should.match(/^\d+\.\d+\.\d+$/);
  }
};

Zombie

Zombie (GitHub: assaf / zombie, MIT license) by Assaf Arkin is a similar project that simulates a browser to perform tests. Assaf’s examples use the CommonJS assertion module:

var zombie = require("zombie");

// Load the page from localhost
zombie.visit('http://localhost:3000/', function(err, browser) {

  // Fill email, password and submit form
  browser.
    fill('email', 'zombie@underworld.dead').
    fill('password', 'eat-the-living').
    pressButton('Sign Me Up!', function(err, browser) {
      // Form submitted, new page loaded.
      assert.equal(browser.text('title'), 'Welcome To Brains Depot');
    });
});

These tests could also be run with a suitable test runner.

The author claims this library is insanely fast, but I haven’t verified its performance. Performance is important for testing because people are less likely to bother running them if they take too long to run, so it’s probably worth trying both Zombie and Tobi out to see how they fare compared to your current functional/integration/acceptance testing solutions.

Node-validator

node-validator (License) by Chris O’Hara is a library for string validation, filtering and sanitization.

It can be used in a browser or Node, but the really interesting thing about this library is the author’s example of using it to validate requests in a Node app. There’s a gist that makes the following possible:

get('/', function(req, res) {
    req.onValidationError(function() {
        // Redirect the user...
    });

    // Validate user input
    req.check('zip', 'Please enter a valid ZIP code').len(4,5).isInt();
    req.check('email', 'Please enter a valid email').len(6,64).isEmail();
    req.checkHeader('referer').contains('localhost');

    // Sanitize user input
    req.sanitize('textarea').xss();
    req.sanitize('foo').toBoolean();

    // etc.
});

Now requests to a URL with parameters like http://localhost:8080/?zip=12345&foo=1&textarea=large_string will be validated. This could be very useful for sanity checking in an Express app, for example.


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