Whiskey - A new node.js test framework from Rackspace | Hacker News Reader

Whiskey - A new node.js test framework from Rackspace

rackspace.com

34 pointsrphillips9 comments

A little bit OT, but did anyone else find that the fixed header on the blog made the article less pleasant to read? I kept trying to get it off the screen to focus on the article, and it felt like it was "covering up" something I wanted to see.

Yeah, it takes up more space than my browser chrome does. I removed it with the inspector.

I find it a little strange that this post mentions Expresso but not its successor Mocha, which appears to have been started about the same time as Whiskey.

Anyway, this looks like a valuable contribution, and it's always good to see more well-supported tools in the Node ecosystem.

I currently use mocha with the Jasmine-like interface, and I don't believe I will change.

What I am wondering is why a new code coverage module was built, yet wasn't made available as a separate module. Is it really that dependent upon this particular testing framework?

Disclaimer: I'm author of the blog post.

The title might be a bit misleading, but a first commit to Whiskey was actually made about a year ago (https://github.com/cloudkick/whiskey/commits/master?page=12), before Mocha existed.

s/existed/was released/

Also there's http://vowsjs.org/

This is a nice achievement but I think if you extracted the process orchestration part and made it use mocha for test layout, running of individual test files, and reporting (which it does a really good job at) it would be more useful.

I'm somewhat new to Node, but why do they have you run the test suite like this:

  npm test

as mentioned here https://github.com/cloudkick/whiskey ? Shouldn't that just be 'node whiskey test' or similar?

npm provides a common interface for running package scripts: http://npmjs.org/doc/scripts.html

So if you open the package.json (https://github.com/cloudkick/whiskey/blob/master/package.jso...) you'll see that `test` runs `make test`.

Check out the Makefile (https://github.com/cloudkick/whiskey/blob/master/Makefile) to see what `npm test` is doing. This abstracts out the test command, because you could be running `cake test`, `make test`, `node whiskey test`, etc. and if you're just using the node package, you probably don't care what the command is, you just want to run the tests. `npm test` is the way to do it.

npm test runs whatever shell command is in package.json under scripts/test.

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