If you look at the JavaScript test tool ecosystem, you will find it’s generally quite large. But you will see the same tool names pop up fairly regularly. The decisions actually fall along some fairly simple and standard lines. In this post I want to show you at least some of your choices and then apply those choices to testing against a web application.

In this post, I want to cover using two particular libraries as part of the JavaScript testing ecosystem. I’ll be very briefly covering Mocha and Chai. I tend to use these quite a bit and will likely do so in future posts. This post will thus serve as a brief introduction to the tools along with a working example.

As many of my readers my know, or have figured out, I’ve been a fan of the Ruby language for quite some time and I’ve used it to construct some of my own open source testing solutions. I’m now actively pursuing JavaScript as my potential test ecosystem of choice. In a few upcoming posts, I’ll talk about this journey with practical examples. This first post starts things off by getting you up and running with a few possible JavaScript technologies.