JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Let me introduce you to something called SailsJS, a Node framework built on top of Express. Yes, it’s a framework on top of a framework, like my Sunday pancake stack. This may sound like overkill, but Express is really a microframework in that it only provides very basic functionality for your app. SailsJS adds extended functionality to get your app running off the ground quickly. Getting hungry?

SailsJS Services are pieces of reusable code that can be shared by your controllers. Your business logic should live in your Service (and not in your controller!). I know I am stepping on egg shells here, but unfortunately many web frameworks have bastarized the definition of models (the "M" in "MVC") and limited it only to where database stuff happens. However by definition Models are much more than your Data Access Layer. 

Unit testing JavaScript is easy they said. It only takes a few seconds they said.

And they were right for the most part! Well, maybe seconds is an exaggeration but we can definitely achieve this with very few minutes

So you fired up your first hello world app using SailsJS, it was super simple and you started wondering if testing your app would be as simple. Soon after you realized this was not the case and much like everything else related to testing in JavaScript there is not just one right answer.

Perhaps you may have much more experience with SailsJS and have way gone beyond the hello world phase and now is time to make sure your application is reliable. Unit testing is part of the solution when it comes to code reliability.

 I stumbled across Sails.js, the new kid on the block. It seemed very promising and addressed some issues that I had with Derby and with Meteor. Namely, both of those frameworks seem very tightly coupled from the client to the server and I wanted something that would provide more flexibility while still allowing me to develop rapidly. So, I decided to begin prototyping out my new side project in Sails and naturally I developed a variety of opinions to rant about. Enjoy.

As the title states, we are going to discuss how to build an RFID-based asset tracking system using popular open source tools like Node.js and MongoDB. For the sake of simplicity, let’s start with a very basic model of a system addressing only a general concern of getting some information from RFID hardware and putting it in the database. Of course, in real life we would have to think about many details and additional components to take into account security, bandwidth consumption, monitoring, etc., but let us forget about it all for now and get back to these aspects in our future posts.

Let's suppose you wrote a SailsJS Controller and a SailsJS Service. You got them to work together, and now you want to mock the service while testing your controller.

The problem is that SailsJS magically injects Services -- and Models, and everything else -- into the Controller, making it difficult to simply call HelloController.index() without lifting SailsJS. We need the dependencies to be in place (otherwise we will get a bunch of ugly undefined is not a function kind of errors.

Fortunately, lifting SailsJS in code is almost as easy as running sails lift on your command line, and that is exactly what we are going to do in order run our tests.