14 DAY TRIAL // John Resig, the creator of the infamous jQuery JavaScript library, has announced on GitHub the release of a new Mozilla Labs project, called TestSwarm. Developed under his supervision, this is still in Alpha development, and even if it's not yet featured on the Mozilla Labs official page, he has confirmed that it will be officially released in the near future.
To put it simpler, TestSwarm is a JavaScript testing platform where different tests are run on user's browsers and operating systems. For now, it is performing tests only for some of the most used open-source platforms like jQuery, Dojo, YUI, MooTools, and Prototype, but future plans for the project include a section where developers can submit their own code to be tested on the TestSwarm servers.
The idea was born when John Resig, a Mozilla developer, came across several problems when testing new suites for jQuery. He found that cross-browser JavaScript test just don't scale and proposed a method of distributed continuous integration testing.
“The primary goal of TestSwarm is to take the complicated, and time-consuming, process of running JavaScript test suites in multiple browsers and to grossly simplify it,” said Resig, TestSwarm creator and developer. “It achieves this goal by providing all the tools necessary for creating a continuous integration workflow for your JavaScript project.”
This way, for every commit in a JavaScript project, the developer will be spared of installing multiple browsers on their system for code support tests, and can simply submit all their code to the TestSwarm website.
Here, users just login and supply their browsers to the TestSwarm servers that execute them on the client computer. Thus, for a simple test, the developer gets results for various browsers in different operating systems.
At the moment, on the TestSwarm homepage, tests are being conducted on seven different operating system versions (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and 14 browsers, ranging from Mozilla to Konqueror.
More information can be found at the project’s wiki page on GitHub. The project's source code can be downloaded from the Softpedia Scripts section via this link. Also, a video tutorial about TestSwarm was provided by John Resig on Vimeo. The official page of the TestSwarm service can be found here.