use Perl

Want fame and fortune? Have more tuits than I do? Integrate Perl and Javascript tests. Here's how.

I'm writing Javascript tests for Bricolage 2.0 and realize I have a huge problem. The JS tests are run through a HTML document that passes a form object to a class:

JSAN.use('Test.More');
JSAN.includePath = ['../../../www/js'];
JSAN.use('Kinetic.Search');

var search_form = document.search_form;
var url         = new Kinetic.Search().buildURL(search_form);
var expected    = 'http://www.example.com/some/url';
is(url, expected, 'search_form should return the correct URL');

Now this is all well and good, but there's a serious problem here. The search forms are generated dynamically. I'm about to change how they work but I really don't want to have to keep remembering to update the form in my tests. It dawned on me that I could get around this by using HTTP::Server::Simple to generate forms and have the Javascript tests run against those. Thus, they're always running against real Perl code. I understand that Apache test may come close, but I don't know if it can run the Javascript tests.

Since I'd already be running a simple server, why not have the server run the real Perl test suite and pass those results to the Javascript Test.Builder? By running one server, I could run my Javascript and Perl tests at the same time. Cunning, eh?

Now if only I had the time to indulge in this ...

I'm sure you'd win many admirers if you have more time for this than I do :)

In fact, if you set it up so it can collect any valid TAP results, we could integrate just about any programming language tests with JavaScript. I don't know if this has ever been done before.