Full disclaimer ahead of time: one of the creators of Crosscheck is my good friend Charles Lowell. Aside from being friends, we do a weekly podcast together.
That out of the way, The Front Side has been rev’ing community infrastructure and now has a new developer site along with a IRC channel for support.
Crosscheck is a browserless JavaScript unit testing framework, open sourced under the LGPL license. What this means is that you can test JavaScript without a browser. What’s even more valuable is that Crosscheck “hosts” simulates browser-centric JavaScript (things like document and alert) and they’ve painstakingly created IE and FireFox simulators, including bugs and proprietary APIs, in those hosts.
Thus, you can test your JavaScript and AJAX without using a browser. Meaning you could setup up continuos builds with JavaScript unit tests and, even more handy, speed up the process of writing test-first (or even test-last) JavaScript coding.
The Front Side also provides Freestyle, a framework for AJAX enabled web applications that covers not only the front-end, but also the server side.
Tags: ajax, thefrontside, javascript, unittesting, testing, crosscheck
4 Comments
Sweet! Congrats Charles:) We’ll definitely take a look. We’ve been doing a lot of work on our testing infrastructure and automation. Trying to get everything wrapped up into cruise control right now. We should do a podcast with you two and Dave to chat about Ajax and testing.
Sounds good, Andre. I’m on vacation this week, but maybe sometime in the next 2-3 weeks.
Not sure where to post questions since cogentdude.com shows a last update date in 2005.
Does Crosscheck emulate Safari?
Alas, Crosscheck does not emulate Safari. Right now, it only does those things necessary to unit test our code which uses a subset of the features available in IE6, Firefox 1.0, and Firefox 1.5. We’ve gotten several inquiries about other browsers (Safari and Camino topping that list), as well as various features.
As it stands, crosscheck only simulates those browser features specifically needed by freestyle, so at the moment, if you’re being ever-so-terribly clever with your javascript, and using advanced or obscure browser hacks(most good ajax framework do), crosscheck will probably not work for you “out of the box.” But, that’s why we open sourced it, with the hope that early adopters interested in the crosscheck approach, can, with our help, add the features that they need most.
The best place for questions or comments about crosscheck is through one of the public channels to be found on the Crosscheck development site
Cheers,
Charles
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