Hacker News Reader

Comment by daliusd | Hacker News Reader

I have experience in Python (wsgi, paste, pylons, GAE) and ASP.NET (MVC). I like programming using node/express - node packaging system is very simple, express code is understandable and very readable. There are some things that you do not get out of the box but overall that's minor problems.

The only problem for me as automated testing and in result I have written my tests in Python.

View on HN

The only problem for me as automated testing and in result I have written my tests in Python.

To a Ruby developer like myself, this seems like a pretty significant gap.

Have you looked at Jasmine or some of the other testing frameworks for Node? Or is there something inherent about writing async apps that makes them difficult to test?

There are some good testing libraries for node (eg. https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha, by the same author as Express), that make async testing fairly painless. However, there are things like DB setup/teardown that aren't integrated and you might be used to getting "for free" with other frameworks (eg. Django). I'm curious to hear what the parent commenter has found to be a roadblock.

Actually no roadblocks (details in other comment). Just python was simpler and I don't see problem writing different parts in different languages.

Here is a little bit of background. I'm writing RESTful service using node and I really like how easy is to write async code. There are tools in node that allows me testing it - one example here https://github.com/flatiron/api-easy but there are more that I have considered. The problem I have with all those options: I need to write too much code to produce simple test. Python unittest and python-requests modules allow me writing much simpler code that actually does the same. There is simply no sense writing async code for unit-test like testing. Node is good for writing async code and I'm really happy this that.

Client side async code has its own place as well. I really enjoyed writing complex load tests with node. That was simpler than investigating python options and node is faster in such scenario.

It's always going to be a little annoying with node's callbacks, but they dont have to be large. In connect all I do for an http test is (with mocha) https://gist.github.com/a5f796fff5fc72748e1b

A lot of it definitely comes down to API, but when it comes to callbacks I would agree

Reply on news.ycombinator.com