Hosting company Rackspace has announced the release of its Whiskey test framework as open source. Named after the developer's "favourite adult beverage", Whiskey is a suite for testing applications written in Node.js, a popular event-driven, JavaScript-based web application framework that uses Google's V8 JavaScript engine to provide just-in-time compiled performance.

In the announcement, Rackspace software developer Tomaz Muraus says that the team decided to create Whiskey because they found that the test frameworks that were available when they started working with Node.js were somewhat limited. Muraus notes that they used expresso for some time, but that it "didn't really offer any kind of test isolation and process orchestration".

In Whiskey, each test file – each file is a collection of tests – is isolated in a separate process. The code coverage module is said to offer more flexibility and features, such as three different reporters (text, html and json) and support for aggregating code coverage reports, over other solutions. Whiskey also includes support for async tests, tap output, generating Makefiles, and reporting variables that have leaked into the global scope.

Further information about Whiskey, including download links, installation instructions and test file examples, can be found on its GitHub project page. Source code for Whiskey is made available under version 2.0 of the Apache licence.

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(crve)