TiddlyWiki 5 end to end test suite comparison

This repo contains the same set of end to end tests written in two testing libraries: Cypress and Playwright using similar paradigms.

How to use:

This test suite requires an empty edition of TiddlyWiki 5 running. You can use https://tiddlywiki.com/empty.html but it's likely to fail some tests because it's not the most cutting edge version.

Get TW Empty edition

1. Clone TW from Github or download the source code -- https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5
2. TW has no external dependencies.
3. In TW directory run node tiddlywiki.js editions/empty --listen start the empty edition, by default it'll be accessible on URL http://localhost:8080

Run test suite

1. Clone the repository
2. Run npm ci to install dependencies
3. Copy config/config.example.ts and name the copy config/config.ts
4. Change the default configuration if needed
5. Run npm run test

Differences

Cypress and Playwright are very different beasts. The former feels best suited for testing things where you have all data beforehand, the latter is much more flexible but creates a small await hell.

Cypress:

• Leans on a global cy object which requires less passing things around
• Is very unfriendly for the Page Object pattern - you almost need to hack your way around how its written to achieve any semblance of the pattern. It's meant to use App Actions
• Seems very opinionated
• Its TypeScript declarations are difficult to replicate in your code

Playwright

• Feels very familiar if you have Selenium experience
• Lends itself really well for Page Object pattern
• Requires writing loads of awaits everywhere
• Very flexible, allows you to create your own paradigm

Which is better for Tiddlywiki?

• Because of my Selenium experience I much more prefer Playwright. I don't like the idea of App Actions for a few reasons that are not important here, but to the extent you need to play with TiddlyWiki's internals you can do it just as well in Playwright.
  • Also Cypress's power in working with app internals only works for modern SPAs and feels completely useless for anything more traditional, like a PHP website where all the internals are stored on the server side.
• I like the idea of Page Objects and writing tests from the perspective of how user interacts with the site, which can then be wrapped with operations to reduce the repetition
  • No operations are currently in the repo, but loads of General.spec.ts could be rewritten into a few simple operations - CreateTiddlerOperation, EditTiddlerOperation, DeleteTiddlerOperation.
• I like writing in TypeScript and Playwright feels better in that regard.