Comments on: Continuous Integration for Front End Developers

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:50:39 +0000

G, thats a really interesting article!

By: Egyszerű red/green frontend ellenőrzés : Pixelszabászat

Egyszerű red/green frontend ellenőrzés : Pixelszabászat — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:51:37 +0000

[...] Itt pedig kicsit bővebben a folyamatos integráció módszeréről, ami a Ruby / Rails / Merb világban is eléggé elterjedt. [...]

By: Ryan King

Ryan King — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:44:11 +0000

Thanks for all the feedback. You have some really good ideas there that I’d like to implement. Its just a matter of time and priorities at this point. I’ll likely add CSS validation, feed validation, link checking and crawling first. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks to a month.

And there’s also likely be a subscription service soon, which will be differentiated from the free version based on how many URLs you can enter and whether it will crawl or not. Not promising anything, though. :)

By: gareth

gareth — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:05:24 +0000

@Steve Absolutely. But the beauty of automation is, once set up, it doesn’t cost time every. single. time. you do something. Validating my HTML is boring and time consuming, especially as I make relatively few mistakes (I like to think). It’s too easy not to run a good test suite unless you automate it. If something tells me I got something wrong then I’ll fix it.

Now put all that in the context of a team of people working on a few decent sized projects. How does the lead or project manager or whatever ensure quality? You have to trust people to some extent but I’d still much rather automate away a load of boring repetitive work and then concentrate on real problem areas.

By: Javascript News » Blog Archive » Continous Integration for the Front End

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:05:15 +0000

[...] Gareth Rushgrove has posted on continous integration for the front end. [...]

By: Steve Woods

Steve Woods — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:58:43 +0000

I think a lot of what you proposed can be taken care of without the automation; surely you should be taking care of a lot of it anyway as you develop?

Having said that, if it could detect a WordPress site and make sure the author has fixed the tabindex fault on the comment form it’d be a godsend! :P

By: Tim Beadle

Tim Beadle — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:56:14 +0000

@Gareth: we don’t even have PHP installed on our Linux servers :(

By: gareth

gareth — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:26:54 +0000

@Tim yeah, I just like how the CSS assertions work. But if you set everything up in a service orientated manner you could have remote services written in anything. I agree it should be language agnostic (which is why a web app makes sense) as front end devs work everywhere.

By: Tim Beadle

Tim Beadle — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:14:55 +0000

@Gareth: Lime Testing Framework presumably only applies if you’re working in PHP. We’re a Java/JSP house, so either a Java solution or something entirely independent of the backend, like Selenium, is required.

By: gareth

gareth — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:42:55 +0000

@Neil My sentiment exactly. Screenshots would be cool too. Something like Litmus (or even using it as the external service)

@Tim Good idea, though I’ve never really got on with Selenium. The Lime Testing Framework from symfony also has a markup assertion testing suite, using CSS rules to specify the existence of markup.

By: Tim Beadle

Tim Beadle — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:31:12 +0000

Hi Gareth,
What about using Selenium as well, to assert that certain pieces of content or markup are present?
http://www.openqa.org

By: Neil

Neil — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:04:40 +0000

That level of automation would be a god send. I recently found I’d broken a site’s XHTML through some typos (doh), and the rendering in IE6/7 because conditional stylesheets weren’t being loaded. If these were being checked automagically, they wouldn’t have happened.

One potential addition to the list: how about automated screenshots of the homepage being sent through from a range of browsers?