Background
For testing web applications, we can use several options. Among those options, although interchangably used, some of them are framework where others are tools or libraries. Generally tools are applications with user interface, frameworks are complete applications and libraries provide specific functionality.Nowadays, E2E test automation frameworks are very popular since they do not require extra library dependencies. Since most of them are JS based, the basic components of the execution environment should be known:
- Nodejs is the event driven JS runtime env
- Npm is the node package manager
- Nvm is the Node version manager
- React: Published in 2013 by Meta, provides reusable components, it is a rendering view library.
- Angular: Published in 2010 by google, provides client side rendering, whole framework including routing and calling services.
- Vue: Published in 2014, client side rendering view model.
Languages
Modern test frameworks support most of the programming languages. If test code is supposed to be (not necessarily) aligned with the application code, it can be either Javascript or Typescript. But which one is better? Actually not too much different, let's see:Javascript
Js is a language developed for web programming in 1995. It supports only dynamic typing.Typescript
TS is an OOP language which was developed for large scale applications in 2012 by Microsoft. It is a superset of JS and needs to be compiled before execution. It supports both static and dynamic typing. Strong typed structure throws error for the dynamic typing such aslet var = 'a';var = 1; [but still runs]I had alread noted the scopes and types here. Fore quick notes about Modules and functions, please see here.