guts.md

guts-zombie.js(1) -- The Guts

Hacking

To get started hacking on Zombie.js you'll need Node.js and NPM:

$ brew install node
$ curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh

Next install all the runtime and development dependencies:

$ npm install

To run the test suite:

$ npm test

If you're hacking on Zombie and testing it in a different project, you can "install" your working directory using npm link.

To generate the documentation:

$ make doc
$ open html/index.html

Grocking

Zombie.js is written in CoffeeScript, a language that mixes the best parts of Python and Ruby and compiles one-to-one into JavaScript.

The DOM implementation is JSDOM, which provides an emulation of DOM Level 3. There are some issues and some features Zombie.js needs but JSDOM doesn't care for. Those are patched onto JSDOM in lib/zombie/jsdom_patches.coffee and lib/zombie/forms.coffee.

HTML5 parsing is handled by HTML5.

DOM selectors are provided by JSDOM using Sizzle.js.

Testing

Zombie.js is tested using Mocha.

Since we're testing a Web browser, we also need a Web server, so it spins up an instance of Express. Spinning up Express and making sure it doesn't power down before all tests are done (Vows is asynchronous, like everything in Node) is the responsibility of spec/helper.coffee.

To stress Zombie.js, we have test cases that use Sammy.js and jQuery. The scripts themselves are contained in the spec/.scripts directory. The dot is necessary to hide these JS files from Vows.

Documenting

Zombie.js documentation is written in Markdown.

Everything you need to know to get started is covered by README.md, so it shows up when you visit the Github page.

Additional documentation lives in the doc directory. Annotated source code generated using Docco.