Carte Blanche – isolated development space with integrated fuzz testing | Hacker News Reader

Carte Blanche – isolated development space with integrated fuzz testing

github.com

94 pointstilt8 comments

The UI looks very similar to the Cosmos project (https://github.com/skidding/cosmos).

Could you outline the main differences and the motivation behind creating a different project in favor of contributing to an existing one?

I have met skidding last February when this was project was in its early stages. We walked through Cosmos and it definitely was an inspiration to Carte blanche. Skidding even helped us to design the initial props form: https://github.com/carteb/carte-blanche/issues/47

Cosmos in my opinion is a fantastic tool and covers even some areas we haven't touch yet, but planning to do soon like injecting/manipulating the internal state of a component.

While there a many more differences these are probably the most interesting ones:

- The core of Carte blanche is a Webpack plugin. By hooking into the main compilation of Webpack Carte blanche can identify your components and list them in an application living within your running server on different URL path. The coolest part from my perspective is that we inherit all your webpack settings by default. No need to configure your loaders. Cosmos in comparison is a separate app.

- In Cosmos your need to write your examples by hand. Carte blanche reads out your propTypes/Flow types and allows us to generate a form input for each of your properties including nested structures like a person object containing an avatarUrl, firstName & lastName. This approach allowed us to create some kind of UI fuzz-testing feature in the interface. While I believe that it's important to focus your efforts designing/developing for the most likely cases it's also relevant to cover edge-cases. Fuzz-testing is a great way to discover them.

I hope this help. Let me know if you any other questions :)

Do you only support autogenerated inputs? Is there also a way to create scenario-like examples?

I say this because I'm working on an app with a large drawing canvas component at the moment, and being able to produce hand crafted examples of specific drawing scenarios is really powerful.

I'm doing with this devboard[1] and I've created a mini-DSL within my cards to describe a series of mouse interactions, which can either be played back immediately or one-at-a-time to display the interaction and animations.

Being able to combine this with fuzz-testing would be really cool!

[1] Shameless plug :) https://github.com/glenjamin/devboard

This is not yet implemented, but since the core of CarteBlanche is a plugin system[0] making this happen is definitely possible!

We're happy to provide any support you need to create this, we'd love to see the ecosystem around CarteBlanche thrive to all sorts of different use cases.

[0]: https://github.com/carteb/carte-blanche/tree/master/WRITING-...

Also pretty similar to React Storybook[0]

[0] https://github.com/kadirahq/react-storybook

For me, just the fact that Carte Blanche doesn't need any kind of configuration to work is awesome. I had an hard time trying to make it work the other alternatives. When you use webpack plugins like the decorators it becomes a nightmare :(

With Carte Blanche, you put one line in your webpack.dev and it works!

I didn't need much special configuration for React Storybook either. It has a separate webpack config and it was just a couple lines to include my main config and everything worked.

Awesome project :)

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