Google launches JavaScript test suite

BANGALORE, INDIA: Google on Monday announced that it is releasing a JavaScript test suite, Sputnik, a set of more that 5000 tests for JavaScript language as defined in the ECMA-262 standard.

“The goal was to create a test suite based directly on the language spec that checked the behavior of every object, function and individual algorithm in the language. As the test suite grew we used it to ensure that V8 conformed to the spec and to detect unexpected changes in our behavior,” said a blog post by software engineer, Christian Plesner Hansen at the official Google website.

Sputnik is an open source project under the BSD license and Google hopes that the JavaScript implementors find this new launch to be useful.

The goal is not that all implementations should pass all tests. V8 set out with that intention and we learned the hard way that sometimes you have to be incompatible with the spec to be compatible with the web, said the blog.

Google want this tool to enable the developer community to identify the differences between implementations and incompatibilities between browsers.

“In an ideal world web developers would not have to worry about which browser is being used to view their site and users would not have to worry about whether a site supported their browser. We hope the Sputnik tests will make the browser community take another step towards making that a reality,” added the blog.