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Jasmine vs Protractor: What are the differences?

Introduction

Jasmine and Protractor are both popular frameworks used for testing JavaScript code. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two. This Markdown code provides a concise overview of these differences.

  1. Jasmine: Jasmine is a behavior-driven development (BDD) testing framework for JavaScript code. It provides a way to write and organize tests and assertions in a human-readable format. Jasmine focuses on the syntactic structure of tests and provides a simple API to write tests.

  2. Protractor: Protractor, on the other hand, is an end-to-end testing framework specifically designed for Angular applications. It uses the Selenium WebDriver to interact with the application. Protractor allows testing the behavior of an application in a real browser, including user interactions and navigation.

  3. Syntax Style: In terms of syntax style, Jasmine uses a descriptive syntax that reads like natural language, making it more readable for developers. Protractor, being an extension of Jasmine, includes the same descriptive syntax style but with additional features specific to Angular applications.

  4. Angular Features: Protractor has built-in support for Angular-specific features such as built-in waits, Angular bindings, and synchronizing with Angular's event loop. This makes Protractor more suitable for testing Angular applications compared to Jasmine.

  5. Element Locators: Another significant difference between Jasmine and Protractor is in how they locate elements on the page. Jasmine primarily relies on CSS selectors and JavaScript DOM traversal methods to locate elements. Protractor, being an end-to-end testing framework, provides a higher-level API to locate elements using Angular-specific locators like by.model, by.binding, or by.repeater.

  6. Browser Automation: Protractor provides built-in browser automation capabilities through the Selenium WebDriver, allowing you to perform actions in a real browser environment. In contrast, Jasmine does not offer native browser automation, and the tests typically run in a headless mode or a simulated browser environment.

In summary, Jasmine is a versatile testing framework for JavaScript code, focusing on the syntactic structure of tests, while Protractor is a specialized end-to-end testing framework specifically designed for Angular applications, providing additional features for Angular-specific testing.

Advice on Jasmine and Protractor
Yildiz Dila
testmanager/automation tester at medicalservice · | 5 upvotes · 269.5K views
Needs advice
on
CypressCypress
and
ProtractorProtractor

In the company I will be building test automation framework and my new company develops apps mainly using AngularJS/TypeScript. I was planning to build Protractor-Jasmine framework but a friend of mine told me about Cypress and heard that its users are very satisfied with it. I am trying to understand the capabilities of Cypress and as the final goal to differentiate these two tools. Can anyone advice me on this in a nutshell pls...

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Replies (2)
Kevin Emery
QE Systems Engineer at Discovery, Inc. · | 4 upvotes · 165.9K views
Recommends
on
CypressCypressProtractorProtractor

I've used both Protractor and Cypress extensively. Cypress is the easier and more reliable tool, whereas Protractor is the more powerful tool. Your choice of tool should depend on your specific testing needs. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of each tool:

Cypress advantages:

  • Faster

  • More reliable (tends to throw fewer intermittent false failures)

  • Easier to read code (handles promises gracefully)

Cypress disadvantages:

  • Cannot switch between browser tabs

  • Cannot switch to iFrames

  • Cannot specify clicks or keypresses explicitly as if a real user was interacting

  • Cannot move the mouse to specific co-ordinates

  • Sometimes has trouble switching between different top-level domains, so not good for testing external links

  • Cypress is a newer tool with less extensive documentation and less community support

Protractor advantages:

  • More powerful because it is Selenium-based - it can switch between tabs, it can handle external links to other domains, it can handle iFrames, simulate keypresses and clicks, and move the mouse to specific co-ordinates within the browser.

  • More extensive community support and documentation

Protractor disadvantages:

  • Slower and more brittle - in general there is a higher likelihood of cryptic and/or intermittent errors which may cause your tests to fail even though there is nothing wrong with your application

  • For highly experienced automation engineers, the fundamental "brittle" nature of Selenium can be worked around - it can be reliable but only if you really know what you are doing

  • Less graceful handling of promises - relies on async/await or .then to manage the order of execution. Therefore it is a bit harder to read the code.

  • Harder to set up, and the method of setup impacts its reliability. For example, a hub/node configuration where the selenium jar is on a different physical machine than the browser under test will cause unreliability in your tests. Not everyone knows about this type of thing, so it's common to find Selenium frameworks that are set up poorly.

It's probably better to use Cypress if

  • you're at a smaller company and have a close relationship with developers who can help write hooks or stubs in their code to assist your testing

  • you don't need to do things like switch between tabs or test links to external top-level domains

It's probably better to use Protractor if

  • You might need to switch between tabs or test external links to other domains within the scope of your framework

  • You want to use a more accurate simulation of how a real user interacts with a browser (i.e. click at this location, type these keys)

  • You're at a company where you won't have any support from developers in writing hooks or stubs to make their code more testable in a less powerful framework like Cypress

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Jian Wang
Web Engineer at sentaca · | 1 upvotes · 194.7K views
Recommends

Please try Handow, the e2e tool basing on Puppeteer.

Gherkin syntax compatible

Chrome/Chromium orentied, driven by Puppeteer engine

Complete JavaScript programming

Create test suites rapidly without coding (or a little bit), basing on built-in steps library

Schedule test with plans and arrange stories with sequential stages

Fast running, execute story groups in parallel by multi-workers

Built-in single page report render

Cover page view, REST API and cookies test

https://github.com/newlifewj/handow

http://demo.shm.handow.org/reports

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Decisions about Jasmine and Protractor

We use Mocha for our FDA verification testing. It's integrated into Meteor, our upstream web application framework. We like how battle tested it is, its' syntax, its' options of reporters, and countless other features. Most everybody can agree on mocha, and that gets us half-way through our FDA verification and validation (V&V) testing strategy.

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Pros of Jasmine
Pros of Protractor
  • 64
    Can also be used for tdd
  • 49
    Open source
  • 18
    Originally from RSpec
  • 15
    Great community
  • 14
    No dependencies, not even DOM
  • 10
    Easy to setup
  • 8
    Simple
  • 3
    Created by Pivotal-Labs
  • 2
    Works with KarmaJs
  • 1
    Jasmine is faster than selenium in angular application
  • 1
    SpyOn to fake calls
  • 1
    Async and promises are easy calls with "done"
  • 9
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Quick tests implementation
  • 6
    Flexible
  • 5
    Open source
  • 5
    Promise support

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Cons of Jasmine
Cons of Protractor
  • 2
    Unfriendly error logs
  • 4
    Limited

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What is Jasmine?

Jasmine is a Behavior Driven Development testing framework for JavaScript. It does not rely on browsers, DOM, or any JavaScript framework. Thus it's suited for websites, Node.js projects, or anywhere that JavaScript can run.

What is Protractor?

Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application running in a real browser, interacting with it as a user would.

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What companies use Jasmine?
What companies use Protractor?
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What tools integrate with Jasmine?
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What are some alternatives to Jasmine and Protractor?
Mocha
Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on node.js and the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases.
Jest
Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.
Karma
Karma is not a testing framework, nor an assertion library. Karma just launches a HTTP server, and generates the test runner HTML file you probably already know from your favourite testing framework. So for testing purposes you can use pretty much anything you like.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
See all alternatives