Hi. I’m new to Meteor, and finding it hard to really make any headway when it comes to deciding on how best to test my Meteor apps. I had such high hopes for Velocity when I read about it first, but to be honest it doesn’t seem to be moving forward much. Their site lacks good documentation, instead suggesting you go buy their book. Incidentally, I was going to buy the book but the release of new chapters seems too slow.
Is there any consensus among the Meteor community regarding how best to test Meteor code? Is Velocity used by most Meteor developers?
Thanks for posting this. I’m one of the core developers on Velocity and also the author of the book.
You’re right about calling out the documentation aspect of Velocity. We recently rewrote http://velocity.meteor.com to make it simpler for people to get started and we are also in the process of considating our docs. I’ve already started doing this for Meteor Cucumber, which you can see here:
The rest of the frameworks will soon follow this approach.
As a new user, I understand that it’s hard to get all the concepts but you should also know that Velocity itself has never stopped being worked on since last June and is still very active. You can check atmosphere and github and see some healthy numbers for usage and updated. Meteor also announced that Velocity will be integrated into the core in the coming releases so you would be right in using it.
The book content is up to date with the latest release of Velocity. The chapters have been a little slow over the last month but I have been working on getting all the material ready for it. If you would like an early peek at the example app that uses all the concepts, you can check:
Until the docs are fully updated, I suggest diving in and seeking out help here. We are always listening and ready to work with people.
Of course there are only a small group of us that do this project for free and we could really use all the help we can get, so if you or anyone reading this would like to do something about this problem and help us with documenting, we would welcome the efforts.
Hi Sam, Philip here. Thanks for the detailed response. I’ll have a look at Letterpress later this evening. Glad to hear the book is progressing, I can appreciate how tough it must be to juggle the amount of things necessary, the book, docs, the code etc. I do like the way the book is laid out, the sections/chapters sound like they will cover exactly what I would want, so I’m sure I’ll purchase once there is more content.
I think the most obviously missing piece of documentation is a what’s what in meteor testing world.
The names of the packages hardly make any sense, all those things remind me of things I have for breakfast.
The one-liner descriptions given on each page for those packages over at velocity.meteor.com only make sense to those who are already familiar with testing. Furthermore, the descriptions overlap so it becomes quite overwhelming to those who want to take on a quick and proven best practices approach to testing.
There are also those that are not listed on that site. Selenium, nightwatch etc.
Therefore, a (perhaps opinionated) (series of) post(s) on introduction to testing would go a long way.
On another note, there used to be two books, one of which I remember pre-paying for. And then (I think a year ago or even earlier) heard an announcement that the one I purchased folded into the other one (perhaps the one mentioned here) but never heard back.
So the history of meteor testing books is kind of a disappointing story.