Writing Testable Frontend Javascript Part 1 – Anti-patterns and their fixes

You can write a dummy backend endpoint, it shouldn't take too long in any platform also you can use PhantomJS with CasperJS and/or Selenium to simulate real user interactions which I think can be much more useful than simple unit tests.

Also calling simple practices anti-patterns seems a little over-religious to me, I don't believe in black and white mentality "if you are not doing everything the 'right' way, you are doing it wrong", some stuff are just simple and don't require heavily structured code to make it maintainable, if it grows over time you will have to refactor it anyway. I think you can code much more effectively if you always use the method that is best suited for that particular use case.

If you can make your login form work with 10 lines of jQuery, I say go for it, but if you are developing an advanced CRUD application, you are probably better off with MVC or some other structured paradigm.

What's the state of the art JavaScript automated testing stack look like? Does anyone have an awesome example? I'd love to start testing my frontend code with something other than browser refreshes.

I've always liked testing ajax requests with sinon [1]. It injects its own version of an XMLHttpRequest object to keep track of all requests, and you can also send specific responses to test success and failure handling.

[1] http://sinonjs.org/docs/#useFakeXMLHttpRequest