Edit[04/2011]: Since I seem to get the odd google hit on this it is worth pointing out that Justin Searls has since updated the plugin to include a lot more useful configuration options and also made it available in the maven central repo. So you can just use it straight away by following the instructions.
Edit[05/2011]: and now there is also this awesome site where you can try out jasmine and even do it in coffee script - all in your browser. Happy pandas all around!
As the amount of javascript in our project has grown quite considerably, it was time to get rid of this black spot in our test coverage. And since I'm getting more and more used to test-drive the code I'm writing, it was especially annoying to have to regress to trial-and-erring for the javascript part of our code.
I was overwhelmed by the choice of testing frameworks but eventually settled on jasmine, as that seems to be the most widely supported one with a reasonable syntax.
As all testing that is not automated might as well not exist it was important that it was possible to integrate it into our Teamcity setup. Thankfully, seraching for jasmine and maven quickly pointed me to jasmine-maven-plugin.
This plugin builds a html test runner that includes all javascript files in your project and then gets accessed with htmlunit and can run during the maven test phase, requiring no changes to our Teamcity build configuration.
Since we have a bunch of library and legacy javascript code that takes offence to being included directly I needed a way to filter which files actually got included in the test. There was some slightly out-of-date fork on github that included changes to configure inclusion and exclusion patterns which I was able to adapt to the current version (Which is available here).
The nice thing here is that all files are still copied to the target directory and the exclusions only affect what files get loaded in the test runner which proved useful soon enough.
I wasn't really happy just expecting all files to be loaded in the tests since that is not likely how it would happen in the deployed code. I am hoping to have the test specs define what other files are required by a specific functionality. Since all files get copied it is easy enough just loading them from inside the tests. I'm not quite happy with that yet as globals don't get reset between different jasmine Specs but it should be easy enough to add that functionality at some point.
Another nice feature of the maven plugin is the inclusion of other javascript artifacts. This way you can deploy libraries like jquery to your local maven repository and have them automatically included in your test runner.
So, with that said, this is what I currently have in our maven configuration:
Most of the options are explained very well in the main jasmine-maven-plugin README. I've only changed the plugin version to our own locally deployed version and made use of the new include option. This will only include files named *_spec.js in the test runner. The specs will then load additional files themselves.
