Are aUnit frameworks on the horizon?
Something that’s been rolling around in the back of my mind for some time is the term aUnit Framework. A lot of developers are familiar with xUnit family, as least by name if nothing else. If not, I highly recommend reading Martin Fowler’s xUnit history writeup. “aUnit” is not the greatest title, but neither was Microsoft Bob if you ask me.
I say it’s a poor choice of names because I’m not talking about unit-tests in the traditional sense. The web development community needs a well-designed tool crafted around the constructs that the modern-day web is fashioned from. Selenium is quite powerful, but my experience has been that it’s a royal pain to make any but the simplest tests tolerant of response delays with Ajax calls. In the pure Unit Testing world, YUI Test and my personal favorite, QUnit are excellent for running suites against strictly client-side code, and are capable of wrapping tests around Ajax calls, but there isn’t a clean way to tie those into any kind of continuous integration build.
Looking around StackOverflow and the various feeds I subscribe to from other developers, I see a huge desire for something that just works without an undue amount of pain and suffering.