standalone Jasmine vs Karma - Jasmine

Question

I'm new to testing in general, and have been teaching myself Jasmine. I'm trying to understand the differences between running Jasmine and jQuery-Jasmine in Karma vs running Jasmine by itself. The tutorials for Jasmine don't address the adjustments that are needed if using Karma.

Can someone explain to me how Karma-Jasmine differs in requirements from the standalone Jasmine? Does it still require a spec runner, and is the file structure still the same?

I'm testing DOM events - a lot of click handlers - and don't understand how to mock this. Can someone outline some basic ideas? If I want to, for example, check that a p element has been added to a div after a user clicks a button, how would that work in both file structure and functions?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Karma and Jasmine's SpecRunner.html are both test runners (aka spec runners). The difference between the two is that Karma is an application that runs outside the browser, while SpecRunner is a normal HTML file with a bunch of script references that you open up in a browser.

A test runner that lives outside the browser gives you a number of benefits:

• automatically run tests in one or multiple browsers at once
• automatically run tests on file changes, without having to manually refresh the browser
• file pre-processing, i.e.
  • compiling TypeScript to JavaScript before running tests
  • inlining HTML templates into JavaScript
• file/report generation, i.e. test coverage reports
• test framework flexibility
• easily include/exclude test and source files using file and folder patterns rather than trying to wrangle 100s of <script> references in a HTML file