A Test Environment for Web Single Page Applications (SPA)

Abstract

The architecture of web applications has evolved in the last few years. The need to provide a native-like quality user experience has forced developers to move code to the client side (JavaScript). The dramatic increase in the size of the JavaScript code was addressed first with the help of powerful libraries (jQuery) and more recently with the help of JavaScript frameworks. But although nowadays most web applications use these powerful JavaScript frameworks, there is not much information about the impact on performance that the inclusion of this additional code will produce. One possible reason is the lack of simple and flexible tools to test the application when it is actually running in a real browser. We developed a test framework and tools that allows the developer to easily put under test different implementation options. The tools are implemented as plugins for the most popular browsers so the application can run in its real environment. To validate the usefulness of the tools we performed extensive test to a 6 different implementations of a single web application. We found important performance differences across the tested frameworks. In particular, we found that the Backbone instance was faster and used fewer resources.