Re: jsUnit, Cross Browser Support, Asynchronous Data

Robert, Edward

I believe Robert's work is a significant step toward solving some of 
JsUnit's problems, allowing it to continue being a preferred testing 
framework for ECMA.

To increase supported platforms, I'd like to volounteer to help on the 
PPC platform. The products I could provide feedback on are:

Mac OS 9; Netscape, IE, Opera, Mozilla

Mac OS X; Netscape, IE, Mozilla, Opera, OmniWeb

Debian 3.0 for PPC (Linux flavour); Mozilla, Konqueror

I hope to be able to provide help so that JsUnit can be run on a larger 
number of platforms/implementations.

Perhaps others in the group can do the same for the platform they're 
working on?

Kind regards,

/Dimitris

On Monday, April 1, 2002, at 06:00 , Robert Clary wrote:

> Edward,
>
> I would appreciate your feedback on http://bclary.com/jsunit-
> modified.html
>
> The goal was to allow any browser which supports HTML 4.01 and 
> ECMAScript 262-3rd Edition to be able to use jsUnit.
>
> The use of IE/NS6 only features such as innerHTML have been removed and 
> the requirement to support document.getElementById has also been 
> removed. To do this, I replaced the parts of the user interface which 
> required updating with FRAMEs and used document.write to update the 
> contents instead of HTMLElement.innerHTML. As a part of this 
> modification, the script which updates the user interface has been 
> moved into UiUpdater.js.
>
> This was done to extend the range of browsers which could use jsUnit. 
> This is important for jsUnit's use in the DOM TS.
>
> I also modified the runTest method to allow the calling of an 
> asynchronous preTest() function in test cases before any tests are 
> performed in a test document. The reason for this modification was to 
> allow test pages to load external documents asynchronously before 
> running any tests.
>
> Other modifications include addition of DOCTYPEs, and changes in markup 
> for validation purposes.
>
> The modified jsUnit runs all of the standard tests provided with the 
> original jsUnit 1.2.6 on Internet Explorer 5.5 and Netscape 6/Mozilla 
> 0.9.9+ on Windows 2000. Unfortunately it appears Opera still has 
> problems changing the contents of frames so it times out attempting to 
> load the test documents. I have reports that IE 5.13 on Macintosh does 
> not run the tests. I believe this may be due to the method of test 
> function discovery.  I have not tested with other browsers yet but will 
> be soliciting feedback from the members of the DOM TS community.
>
> Some items I am considering but not have done yet are:
>
> Exposure of timeout parameters through the user interface
>
> Ability to continue to attempt to load a test case even after a time 
> out.
>
> Both of these changes would be useful for when the tests are hosted on 
> the network and the user has a slow connection. I have already done 
> this in the runTest method for the preTest().
>
> I am also considering modifying the means by which test functions in a 
> test document are exposed. While using the convention that the names of 
> all test functions begin with "test" is convenient, it appears that 
> this may limit the ability of other browsers such as IE 5.13 on 
> Macintosh from using jsUnit. It seems that an easy approach would be to 
> expose the test functions in an array which could be queried by jsUnit. 
> This would eliminate this dependency and perhaps allow more browsers to 
> use jsUnit.
>
> I hope that you find these modifications appropriate and would consider 
> working with me to introduce these and perhaps some additional 
> modifications into the official release of jsUnit.
>
> Bob
> -- Bob Clary, bclary@netscape.com
> Technology Evangelist, Netscape Communications
> http://developer.netscape.com/evangelism/
>

Received on Monday, 1 April 2002 11:16:28 UTC