JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

You my friend, cannot ignore JavaScript no longer, JavaScript is the most deployed language on earth, a beautiful and expressive language that supports many paradigms and which has a thriving community that continuously expands and improves its ecosystem with patterns, libraries, frameworks and tools. You don’t want to miss this train.

But JavaScript, though forgiving and specially conceived to be easy to learn, can be either daunting for us that have a strongly-typed mindset baggage and come from languages such as C# or Java or even more often laughed at as a toy.

Writing software with JavaScript can be a lot like writing software in the dark. There is no static typing and no compiler, most errors are not found untill the code is executed. Hopefully that is in a test environment, and not when a user is working with your software. I think that a lot of emphasis should be on automated testing and analysing the code. At my current project, we have a rather nice setup in place to do this and guard our quality.

The thing that caused a bit more work is that we are working in a Microsoft environment. So we have Visual Studio (2013) and TFS (2013). The rest of our project consists of C# and we like to work in Visual Studio. Any tooling that we add is preferred to integrate with our current tools. We already have gated checkins and continous integration builds for the .NET code. The CI build runs everything that is in the gated checkin build plus more (and slower) tests.

I recently started using QUnit for unit testing JS code and I’m really impressed with it. I’m sure Jasmine framework is equally good, but I picked up QUnit because none of the languages/frameworks I have learned so far have the letter ‘Q’ in them!!

So I have a simple page which is used to add two numbers and show the sum as a text.