Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
267 lines (157 loc) · 6.52 KB

tutorial06.rst

File metadata and controls

267 lines (157 loc) · 6.52 KB

Part 6 - The Book!

[update April 2012] : The book is now coming out on O'Reilly! more info here:

http://www.tdd-django-tutorial.com/blog/articles/2013/test-driven-development-web-applications-book-exis/

Thanks so much for following on this far! I'm afraid that's all there is for now, but I am about to start on the next stage -- a proper book on TDD for web apps.

If you've found the tutorial useful so far, I wonder whether I can solicit some feeback regarding a book version?

Here's the chapter outline I've got so far. Now, remember, this is a very rough draft, and it's very much bound to change, but I'd love to hear your thoughts... Especially about some quite general questions, like:

  • Am I broadly covering the right sort of stuff?
  • Am I right to spend plenty of time talking about JavaScript, as well as Python?
  • What should I choose as my example app? I've written the outline as if it were a forums app, but I'm starting to see the appeal of one of the other classic examples, the "to-do list" (very simple at base, can be extended easily, opportunities for sharing/social bits, plenty of stuff to do on the client-side too...). What would you choose as an example?

PART 1 - Beginning web app development with TDD

The idea is to dive straight in with a practical example, rather than talking a lot of theory up-front. I had originally thought to start with a toy example (cf these 3 abandoned chapters: http://www.tdd-django-tutorial.com/tutorial/6/ ), but I decided that people prefer real practical stuff to toy examples...

I also want the first few chapters to be very short + bit-sized, so that the reader feels like they're really making progress quickly... (the inspiration comes from Kent Beck's TDD by Example, an awesome book)

Essentially part 1 is a re-hash of this online tutorial, using a differnt example app...

1: Our first functional test with Selenium

  • Briefly discuss difference between functional testing (AKA acceptance testing, integration testing, whatever) and unit testing
  • Write first test - Introduce Selenium, setUp, tearDown
  • Demonstrate we can get it to open a web browser, and navigate to a web page eg - google.com

2: Getting Django set-up and running

  • Change our test to look for the test server
  • Switch to Django LiveServerTestCase. Explain
  • Get the first test running and failing for a sensible reason
  • Create django project django-admin.py startproject
  • It worked!

3: A static front page

  • Look for "Welcome to the Forums", or similar
  • urls.py, direct_to_template ?

4: Super-users and the Django admin site

  • Extend FT to try and log in
  • Explain the admin site
  • Database setup, settings.py, syncdb, admin.py
  • runserver to show login code
  • Explain difference between test database and real database
  • Fixtures

5: First unit tests and Database model

  • Distinction between unit tests and functional tests
  • Extend FT to try and create a new topic
  • new app
  • models.py
  • test/code cycle

6: Testing a view

  • urls.py again
  • Test view as a function
  • assert on string contents

7: Django's template system

  • Introduce template syntax
  • Keep testing as a function
  • The, introduce the Django Test Client

8: Reflections: what to test, what not to test

  • time for a bit of theory/philosophy
  • "Don't test constants"
  • Test logic
  • Tests for simple stuff should be simple, so not much effort

9: Simple Forms

  • Manually coded HTML
  • Refactor test classes

10: User Authentication

  • Sign up, login/logout
  • Email?

11: More advanced forms

  • Use Django Forms classes

12: On Refactoring

  • Martin Fowler
  • Tests critical
  • Methodical process - explain step by step

13: Pagination

  • Extend various old unit tests and FTs

PART 2: More advanced testing for a more advanced site

14: Notifications

  • Django Notifications, for post edits

15: Adding style with MarkDown

  • Using an external library

16: Switching to OAuth: Mocking

  • "Don't store passwords"
  • Discuss challenges of external dependencies

17: Getting Dynamic: Testing Javascript part 1

  • Simple input validation
  • Choose JS unit testing framework (probably Qunit, or YUI)

18: Testing Javascript part 2 - Ajax

  • Dynamic previews of post input

19: Getting pretty: Bootstrap

  • Bring in nicer UI elements

20: Getting pretty: Gravatar

  • pictures for users

PART 3: Getting seriously sexy

21: Getting serious about the client-side + single-page website?

  • Introduce one of the client-side js frameworks -- backbone.js / ember.js / angular

22: Switching Databases 1: PostgreSQL

  • show how Django makes this easy

23: Websockets and Async on the server-side

  • we want dynamic notifications of when new posts appear on a thread we're looking at
  • Need to spin up, Tornado/Twisted/Gevent as well as Django LiveServerTestCase
  • FT opens multiple browser tabs in parallel
  • Big change!

24: Switching Databases 2: NoSQL and MongoDB

  • obligatory discussion of NoSQL and MongoDB
  • descrine installation, particularities of testing

26: Continuous Integration

  • Need to build 3 server types
  • Jenkins (or maybe buildbot)
  • Need to adapt Fts, maybe rely less on LiveServerTestCase

27: Caching for screamingly fast performance

  • unit testing memcached
  • Functionally testing performance
  • Apache ab testing

Well, that's what I have so far. What do you think? Have I missed anything out? Does anything seem superfluous? Most importantly, would you buy it?