Loose Bits

Backbone.js Testing Book

I am very pleased to announce that I am in the last stages of publishing Backbone.js Testing - a book on Backbone.js test architecture and development due in final form around the end of June.

A brief abstract of the book’s content is available from the Packt Publishing website:

Frontend web applications are soaring in popularity and the Backbone.js library is leading this charge with a modular, lightweight approach for organizing JavaScript web applications. At the same time, testing client-side JavaScript and Backbone.js programs remains a difficult and tedious undertaking.

Backbone.js Testing brings sensible practices and current techniques to the challenges of Backbone.js test development. The book introduces fundamental testing concepts, comprehensive test infrastructure design, and practical exercises to easily and systematically test modern JavaScript web applications.

The book progresses from Mocha test suites and Chai assertions to advanced test mocks and stubs with Sinon.JS. The requisite libraries and utilities are introduced with in-depth examples and best practices for integration with your applications. The book guides you through the test planning and implementation processes for your application models, views, routers, and other Backbone.js components.

Backbone.js Testing gives you the tools, examples, and assistance to test your Backbone.js web applications thoroughly, quickly, and with confidence.

To provide a better idea of the book’s structure, the tentative chapter titles are as follows:

1. Setting up a Test Infrastructure
2. Creating a Backbone.js Application Test Plan
3. Test Assertions, Specs, and Suites
4. Test Spies
5. Test Stubs and Mocks
6. Automated Web Testing

All of the code examples in the book are provided online at the website backbone-testing.com and as an open source GitHub repository.

Node.js in Production

Curiosity Media runs the world’s largest Spanish learning website, SpanishDict.com, backed by many different Node.js applications. Since rolling out our first Node.js applications over a year ago, we have collected a fair amount of good and bad operational experiences.

I created a talk about our journey with Node.js for the Seattle Node.js Meetup group’s May 8th, 2013 event. My slides are available at the following locations:

• GitHub Site: A live, navigable reveal.js website. (Note: use the space bar to advance slides and arrow keys to navigate.)
• SlideShare: More traditional format, with download (PDF) links.

And, here’s an embedded format:

Bringing Bootswatch to Sphinx

The Bootstrap Theme for Sphinx documentation continues to evolve, and I’m pleased to announce the v0.2.0 release. The theme integrates Twitter’s Bootstrap library into Sphinx, and v0.2.0 adds new support for Bootswatch CSS extensions, which provide a lot of great new UI possibilities for your documentation. We’ve also internally updated to Bootstrap 2.3.1.

The project’s demonstration site now uses the ”united” Bootswatch theme to give a clean and well… orange-ish feel to the site. Here is a screenshot of the demonstration site in a desktop viewport:

The project is available for download from GitHub and PyPi. You are encouraged to update and try out some Bootswatch goodness!

Sphinx Bootstrap Theme

The Sphinx Bootstrap Theme is an extension for the Sphinx documentation tool, used for Python-based API documentation and static website authoring. The theme integrates Twitter Bootstrap, which is a wildly popular frontend framework. The theme GitHub project provides a demonstration site using the theme.

The theme project continues to move along, and as it has been a while since my last update post, here are some of the changes in version 0.1.6 (since 0.1.0):

• Update to Bootstrap v2.3.0.
• Enable configuration of the depth of the Global TOC (“Site” tab).
• Add footer divider and various other styling tweaks.
• Add Bootstrap styling for tables and inline code snippets

In addition, much of the underlying rendering JavaScript code has been revised. For example, Twitter Bootstrap v2.3.0 handles behavior like dropdown menu clicks in mobile much better than previous versions, enabling removal of some hacks and patches in the theme.

Sphinx Bootstrap Theme Updates!

Almost a year ago, I created the Sphinx Bootstrap Theme project to bring together two of my favorite open source technologies - Sphinx and Twitter Bootstrap. Sphinx is a widely-used Python-based authoring tool for creating static websites and API documentation. Twitter Bootstrap is a frontend JavaScript / CSS framework that offers a consistent UI experience, typography, grid systems, navigation / button / other components, and responsive features for mobile design.

Since its introduction, I now use Sphinx with the Bootstrap Theme for my open source Python projects and we use the theme for all internal technical documentation at work. Coming up on the project’s anniversary, it seemed appropriate to add some tweaks and enhancements to increase the usability and extensibility of the theme.

Improvements now available in version 0.1.0 include:

• Upgraded the Bootstrap libraries to version 2.2.1.
• Added new theme options to control UI appearance and behavior.
• Navigation bar menus now have hierarchical sub-menus for a more intuitive experience.
• Reworked the underlying layout code to support fully responsive design, allowing any site to look great on mobile devices like an iPhone or iPad.
• Created a PyPI package to permit installation via pip install sphinx_bootstrap_theme.

So let’s see how everything looks and works with the new v0.1.0 theme.

Theme Options

The theme has several new options that you can set in the “conf.py” configuration file.

Bootstrap Theme Demo Site

Let’s start with the Bootstrap Theme’s own demonstration website.