JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Testing (i.e. linting, unit tests, integration testing etc..) client-side code is not done as commonly as it should be. The reason it is so commonly not done, besides lack of know-how, is that it is presupposed that it will take time away from other more productive development tasks.

This fallacious notion is, of course, wrong. The repeatable successes in software engineering based on testable (i.e. modular, loosely coupled, small, simple units of code) and tested code has proven again and again to be a time-saver and part of creating maintainable and understandable code. At a minimum, if code is not unit tested it is only a matter of time before it is burnt down and re-written, or abandoned altogether because it becomes unmaintainable and incomprehensible.

In this article, I am going to defend and talk about testing client-side code. It is my intention that the information in this article will give those among us who do not test, the desire and some initial testing knowledge to test, along with the ability to defend its necessity from any agent that might deter testing.

It is still in very early stage and in terms of features it draws uml sequence diagram from your input and you can share the document with multiple users who can participate in collaborative editing.

Behind the scene TextUml is developed with Backbone.js in CoffeeScript, it uses Require.js for modularization, KineticJS for html5 canvas drawing,  Mocha, Chai and Sinon for client side testing. The server side uses all the latest beta of ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET WebAPI and Signalr. 

A number of people, myself included, have a hard time getting started with test driven development (TDD). The issue lies in that it’s difficult to wrap your head around something that is rather non specific in its implementation and it is usually described as “writing your tests before you write your code”.

When developers hear “Write your tests before you write your code”, then they look at their previous test suite they wonder… “How can I possibly write this without having written the code first?