TJ Holowaychuk

Introducing Tobi

A few days ago we released another small test related project named Tobi for nodejs. Tobi is similar to Ruby tools such as Capybara or Webrat in fulfilling the need for headless acceptance testing. Tobi utilizes jQuery and node’s jsdom to give you an expressive foundation for testing your application in a familiar way.

Motivation

For those of you who follow our work at LearnBoost we have a Selenium / Sauce Labs based acceptance testing tool named Soda, which is fantastic to work with and helps us test our massive app before pushing to production. However, large soda suites typically take several minutes to run, even when running parallel in our targeted Sauce Lab browers. This is of course a very important task to perform, but is far to slow for constant execution during development, so we created Tobi.

Examples

Tobi is test-framework agnostic, meaning it will generally work with any test framework out there for node. Below is an example which runs stand-alone.

Paired with the should.js library expressive assertions can be made on both the response as well as the DOM, for example:

res.should.have.header('Content-Type', 'text/html');
$('ul.messages').should.have.one('li', 'Successfully authenticated');

Locators

Tobi uses “locators” which are similar to those found with Selenium, to essentially expand on css selectors making your code that much more readable. For example rather than selecting a form input via css selector such as

$('[name=username]').val('tj');

we can use the browser.* methods to help us

browser.type('username', 'tj');

Zombies?

Oddly enough a similar project yet-again sprung up a few days before we open sourced ours, named zombie.js. It seems to have similar intentions, leaning more towards a “real” browser implementation. Although interesting acceptance tests should be run in real browsers, which is why I like to consider Tobi more of an integration testing framework, or a pseudo-acceptance sanity check for developers, soda still takes care of deployment.

So, check them both out, see which works for you, but dont forget to apply functional tests, I highly recommend giving Sauce Labs a look. There is no replacement for real browsers! get on it!