JavaScript + Selenium

For the last week or so I pretty much did nothing but JavaScript. It was something I wanted to do for a long time, and the time has finally come. The goal was to investigate how mature are JavaScript Selenium bindings and tooling around them. First I needed to learn some JavaScript. Codecademy’s JavaScript course was recommended by a colleague, and it was a nice way to learn the basics. I have also stumbled upon NodeSchool and finished a few workshops there.

There are still a lot of things I need to learn about the language, but the ecosystem was more confusing, at least in the start. Make sure you know the difference between ECMAScript, JavaScript and Node.js.

Our continuous integration was giving me a hard time, yelling at me every time I have pushed JavaScript code, so I had to learn what are the similarities and differences between JSLint, JSHint and JSCS, but also which of them we use and for what.

To be able to run mentioned tools on my machine I had to figure out npm and Grunt.

The adventure did not end there, since there seems to be several JavaScript Selenium bindings. Fortunately, one of them is a part of Selenium project, so the choice was easy. It was slightly confusing that the official name for the bindings are WebDriverJs, but npm package name is selenium-webdriver, not webdriverjs. Naming is hard.

The fun continued with test frameworks. At the very beginning of the adventure, I have paired with a colegue that is familiar with JavaScript and we have picked Jasmine. While investigating existing JavaScript code, I have found out that we use QUnit, but I could not figure out how to use it with Selenium. I still need to learn more about the language.

I was able to make everything work with Mocha (event Grunt!). Looks like WebDriverJs/selenium-webdriver has built-in support for it.

I am looking forward to learning more about the language and the tools.