GoConvey: Go testing in the browser
smartystreets.github.io
smartystreets.github.io
Seriously, no sarcasm here. I have a green tick addiction and need my fix.
Big, complex frameworks such as this are anti-Go. This is bringing notifications, a new DSL, file watching, and whatever else.
I haven't reviewed the code, but it seems a shame somehow to lock some useful features up, with some fancy stuff which isn't opt-in-or-opt-outable.
Props to the authors, it definitely looks cool, but I can't help but think this, and the "Cucumber for Go" posted a few weeks ago have missed the point.
There's decently documented reasons why the Go testing package is the way it is, for a number of reasons (of varying validity). I tend to trust the core team of a language (at least until we've exhausted all the capabilities of the the stdlib and std tools)
For instance, with native Go tests, your `if` statements have inverted logic: if a != b, then it's an error, instead of, a should equal b. Further, inferring clear intent from just "TestThisOrThat" as documentation is nearly impossible.
Fortunately, Go doesn't compile testing packages or files into the final binaries, and the testing framework only has to exist once in your Go workspace, so Go still keeps things pretty tidy.
(For the record, I was insistent on using Go's built-in stuff until I realized that the Go engineers were humans too, and the language isn't perfect yet. For example: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/Kle874lT... -- Russ Cox: "The generator we're using only generates 63 bits worth of output. You're right that we probably should have corrected that before the API freeze. Oh well.")
Also this approach can be adopted in many languages which doesn't have a rich IDE (e.g. Visual Studio or XCode). Are there any similar tools you know of in other languages?
A few quick Google searches turn up some possibilities: Codeception for PHP shows tests in the browser with Selenium... or with a little hacking, you can show RSpec tests in the browser, http://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/07/01/running-rspec-tests-from-...
My friend ended up running the test script in a `while; sleep` loop, and made the script generate an ugly HTML page of the test result. He'd then setup Chrome to refresh every x secs.
What we were really wishing for is something like GoConvey - even thought about doing it ourselves when I explored the `fsnotify` package.
All that to say; this is really neat and I can't wait to integrate it in my workflow.
Until recently, GoConvey was using fsnotify to respond to file changes in the watched directories. We started seeing a lot of "Too many open files" errors, for one reason or another. While fsnotify is a good package, it did more than was needed. All we needed to know is if something changed.
We were able to drop that dependency by simply walking the watched directories and checksumming them as we go by adding up file names and their modification dates. If the checksum is different, GoConvey re-runs tests.
EDIT 1 : I know there's a limit on how many directory you can watch per process. On OS X, I believe it's :
$ sysctl kern.maxfilesperproc
kern.maxfilesperproc: 10240
EDIT 2 : So I see you walk the directories every 250ms per default.
Yes, directories are walked continuously, with 250ms between each scan. So far this has worked pretty well (maybe on slower systems it should be slowed down). Over time I hope we'll get performance tweaked to an optimum.
Does anyone know whether there's something similar for Ruby / Rails?
There are several automatic test runners in Go which work from the terminal. Here's one for example: https://github.com/levicook/glitch. Not as pretty, but perhaps more useful if you want to avoid the browser.
Keep in mind, too, that GoConvey can automatically without the browser by using an idle.py script that's bundled in. If that's all you need, though, then something more lightweight like glitch looks good.