Is WCT still supported?

[nicojs]

Dear Polymer tools maintainers.

What does the future hold for WCT? I'm curious because WCT is currently one of the supported test runners for Stryker, the mutation testing framework and we're wondering if we need to keep supporting it.

I can see that issues surrounding WCT currently don't get much love. Examples:

• [wct-mocha] Doesn't work with the latest major version of mocha (^6.0.0) #3394
• https://github.com/Polymer/tools/issues/created_by/nicojs
• web-component-tester build broken when used alone #3370
• [Enhancement] WCT config: enable reporting of browser version #3325

In its current state, I don't see me using WCT for my own web components. I would rather use Karma or Jest.

[ankon]

In our organization we spent a lot of time getting WCT to work, and learned that it will essentially break with every other version released in some way or the other. And even if WCT itself isn't modified, the world around it moves (browsers, testing libraries like mocha, ...), which also tends to break our WCT tests every single time.

After a long look at this situation at least came to the conclusion that WCT is not viable in the current state as a framework for testing, and adds more headaches than it solves problems.

YMMV, of course.

[nicojs]

@usergenic I can see you did some work for #3394

Would you be so kind as to explain to us how WCT is maintained and where the roadmap is? Thanks a lot!

[usergenic]

@nicojs the short answer is that WCT does not have a roadmap (per se) for any enhancements and maintenance has been much sporadic due to competing demands. As essentially the sole maintainer, my immediate goal is to identify and get rid of major blockers so that existing projects depending on it can stay on course without having to switch it out for a new testing approach. WCT has a lot of dependencies and convenience features which are inherited from the Bower days that are hard to reconcile in the Node world--

In the coming weeks I expect to either try releasing a major version bump of WCT and possibly the rest of the Polymer toolchain, to drop Bower legacy stuff and eliminate outdated dependencies on things like lodash etc to eliminate security warnings on the old libs -OR- provide an equivalent alternative test solution using an existing mature test runner that feels like a good match to WCT's workflow and philosophy. I'll come back to this Issue as soon as we have more details.

Thanks for your patience.

[usergenic]

That said, I just released wct-mocha@1.0.1 that is compatible with mocha@6+ and am preparing to release update to web-component-tester (actually wct-local) that makes it work with Java 10+ (thanks @nelsonsilva)

[usergenic]

wct-local@2.1.4 released

[MatissJanis]

It would be absolutely amazing if we could use jest in our WC tests.

[nicojs]

It would be absolutely amazing if we could use jest in our WC tests.

I guess you could. That is more of a remark to post in the jest issue tracker, isn't it? Jest is not a test framework to be loaded into the browser by WCT. It is a test runner all on it's own.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.