Presentation: "Testing Your Presentation Layer"

Time: Wednesday 15:45 - 16:45

Location: Stanford

Abstract: In the Ruby world, no serious programmer would write an application without a comprehensive test suite. Unfortunately, the realities of integration testing the presentation layer of an Ajax-heavy web application has forced today's programmers to rely on kludges like HTML parsing in Ruby (which can't be used to test JavaScript comprehensively) or Selenium (which requires real-life browsers on every platform armed and ready). Screw that! With Johnson, a transparent Ruby to JavaScript bridge, you can test your JavaScript-heavy pages with ease. Because Johnson is embedded inside of Ruby, you'll be able to run tests directly in JavaScript, and then access JavaScript components in the tests (think Rails.dispatch_to("controller", "action")). I'll show you how to use Screw.Unit for browserless tests of your presentation layer. If you use continuous integration (and you should), you'll be able to easily catch bugs in your presentation layer without having to defer to a real browser running your tests.

Yehuda Katz, Co-author of "jQuery in Action"

 Yehuda  Katz

Yehuda Katz is the plugins team leader of the jQuery project. He is also a core team member of the Merb project, a Ruby alternative to Ruby on Rails.

Yehuda currently works at Engine Yard, where he works on the Merb Ruby framework. Yehuda is the author of jQuery in Action, and is a contributing author for Ruby in Practice.