More Awesomeness: jstests.py

In working with Narcissus, I've uncovered a jewel of a resource in Mozilla's JavaScript unit tests.  The value of unit tests is well understood.  The most critical quality, however, is that they are maintained.  Mozilla has done an exemplary job of this.  The unit tests are constantly growing.  As I write this, there are just shy of 3000 unit tests.  All of them pass with the Tracemonkey engine.

The organization of the tests is well thought out.  Each version of JavaScript has its own test directory.  So if you don't care about certain batches of tests, it is easy to ignore them.

Unfortunately, as with many other things at Mozilla, there is an abundance of out of date documentaion.  The JS Test Library page refers to a Perl script, which appears to be more or less abandoned.  Instead, there is a python script 'jstests.py', written by Dave Mandelin in his copious amounts of free time.  Unfortunately, the old version of unit testing documentation comes up first when searching for it on Google.  Alas.

One thing that is sadly not emphasized is just how easy it is to plug in a different engine to use these tests.  In fact, I have a "shell" for Narcissus JS, written in 30-some lines of Python code.

To hook into the testing framework, you need a "shell" that supports two command line options:
1) -e, which interprets a string of JavaScript code.
2) -f, which handles a JavaScript file.
It must be possible to support multiple files and strings of code, though this is not a particularly difficult challenge.

Some tricks:

• The -m option will let you specify your own module of JS tests.  This is also a convenient way to insert a little JavaScript into the testing process to handle tests relying on non-standard JS features.
• The -x option allows you to ignore a list of tests.  Since Mozilla includes tests for special Firefox-only features, you will want to use this.
• The --failure-file option will write the failing unit tests to the specified file, useful as input for the -x option.

On another note, Narcissus now runs without special extensions in Firefox 4.  Huzzah!  Now to make it interact smoothly with the DOM...