I’ve just started using Jasmine-node on a project I’m starting to help people build recursive-descent parsers. Jasmine-node is a neat little tool, because it allows you to write a command line like this;

jasmine-node spec/ --autotest

And it’ll start a process which monitors your tests. As you save your tests (the .spec.js files), the tests are all re-run, and this makes for a really tight development cycle. As you save, without anything other than ctrl+s, your tests run. Beautiful, really — the fact the test is running without any interference means that you don’t even think about a code-run-test cycle — it’s just code-code-code. Neat.

Special thanks to Clare for helping me get the first few Jasmine tests written. That initial understanding is the thing that cracks open a lot of possibility.