Continous Integration for the Front End
Date : 2008 02 05 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianGareth Rushgrove has posted on continous integration for the front end.
He talks about a new site, inursite.com that does one thing:
The premise is simple; enter a few of your sites and inursite will visit them once a day and run a markup validation service over the page. You then get a feed of the pass or failure status. It’s simple but brilliant. For example, I have this very site added to the service. If I put some invalid markup in this post, tomorrow morning I’ll get an item in my feedreader telling me of my mistake. I’ll get that every day until I fix the problem.
This green/red (pass/fail) type approach to simple tests is what I find most powerful about continuous integration systems like Cruise Control.
Gareth also has some ideas for improvement:
Has all the CSS been compressed using something like CSSTidy. Has all the javascript been compressed using something like JSMin. Does any Javascript pass the harsh taskmaster that is JSLint. If my markup a little bloated? Maybe I could set a maximum size for the markup and get a fail is I go over that. Ditto CSS file size. Ditt Javascript. Ditto images. If pages have associated feeds, then validate them as well according to the relevant specification (probably RSS or Atom). How many HTTP Requests does it take to load the whole page, including all the relevant assets. How many hosts are required to load the whole page? I’d like to be able to set a maximum number and get a fail if I go over that. Is the page gzipped on the server. And just to keep this topical, does the page have either the IE8 meta element or the associated HTTP header set to a particular value.This sounds like setting up YSlow to run in a continous manner.