TAE Boston 2008: The Unsexy Presentations

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, October 1, 2008 @ 2:07 pm

Lets face it, most people come to Ajax conference for the eye candy. TAE Boston 2008 is no different, and the jQuery, Dojo and other sessions are packed. That's great. I love good eyecandy. But the shame is that many folks skip the less sexy presentations, such as today's presentation by Ted Husted entitle Ajax Testing Tool Review. Talks like these and the tools and methods they discuss is what is leading to the "professionalisation" of front end development, as my colleague Brian Dillard likes to say.

Some of the highlights from Ted's talk:

If you like CruiseControl, but it's too fiddly for you, you'll love Hudson, a much more user friendly continuous integration engine.
The Selenium IDE is great for getting started or smoke testing, but use the API's (in Java, C#, Ruby, etc.) to get real, supportable unit tests done.
YUI Test is intrusive, but it overcomes some of the shortcomings for testing asynchronous events that are present in JsUnit and Selenium. See Ted's post on YUI Test.

OK, not sexy, but if you want to develop quality software, you have to keep an eye on the non-sexy bits.

Topics: CruiseControl, Hudson, JsUnit, Test Driven Development, YUI

Comments (3)

Software Development

Comments: 3 so far

Actually, I only skipped it because Douglas Crockford was presenting “JavaScript: The Good Parts” at the same time. It was about bugs in the interpreter and closures, not that sexy, but I’m really glad I was at that one.

Comment by Charles O'Rourke, Wednesday, October 1, 2008 @ 6:02 pm
Agreed, I really enjoyed Ted’s talk today.

I think part of it was that he wasn’t pushing a library or software, but rather giving a solid overview of the current landscape of tools. This unbiased view is something we don’t get a lot of at TAE.

Comment by Paul Irish, Wednesday, October 1, 2008 @ 11:26 pm
Totally with you on this one.

btw, do you know a good profiling js library? I usually do profiling with firebug, but I would have something more configurable (and with real return output) that I can use in different browsers…

Comment by oelmekki, Thursday, October 2, 2008 @ 2:07 am

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