[…] Unfortunately testing web apps can be a bit tricky sometimes. They are designed to be accessed over the network, and to render in a web browser, and so they require your test framework to do network-like and browser-like things to emulate those conditions. While unit tests for classes can be easily mocked, pretending to be a web browser is definitely non trivial. When I work with PHP I usually use the excellent Codeception tool-set to do acceptance testing. When I work in Node or just build front end stuff, I typically use Grunt with Phantom.js. […]

I’ve become very fond of grunt ever since I saw its creator, Ben Alman, speak at Bocoup’s Roost conference back in December about it.

Regardless of what tools one uses, it sometimes gets pretty overwhelming and tedious to just begin a project, so I do a lot of prototyping before even writing the “real code.” Otherwise, I get distracted.

Thanks for this writeup. I first heard about all these tools a couple months ago but I couldn’t find much information on how they compare.

@ Scott Hansen:

Yeah, I am quite amazed how the Node.js community is turning the front end world upside down. It’s primary purpose was really to be a back-end solution, but I love how people co-opted it to create all these interesting front-end development assist tools and frameworks around it.

Also, it is great to have a single modern standard to code for. Few years ago you had to decide whether you are going to use HTML4 strict, loose, XHTML or just say fuck it, and go commando with no DOCTYPE whatsoever. That’s like 3.5 arguments just about standards waiting to happen before any code gets written. Now we have HTML5 and it is pretty good. :)

Wow!! Thanks for the very informative post! I haven’t done any website work in a long time….and when I did it was hand-coded xhtml. Oh, how things have changed for the better!

Scott