Continous Integration for the Front End

Gareth Rushgrove has posted on continous integration for the front end.

He talks about a new site, inursite.com that does one thing:

The premise is simple; enter a few of your sites and inursite will visit them once a day and run a markup validation service over the page. You then get a feed of the pass or failure status. It’s simple but brilliant. For example, I have this very site added to the service. If I put some invalid markup in this post, tomorrow morning I’ll get an item in my feedreader telling me of my mistake. I’ll get that every day until I fix the problem.

This green/red (pass/fail) type approach to simple tests is what I find most powerful about continuous integration systems like Cruise Control.

Gareth also has some ideas for improvement:

• Has all the CSS been compressed using something like CSSTidy.


• Has all the javascript been compressed using something like JSMin.


• Does any Javascript pass the harsh taskmaster that is JSLint.


• If my markup a little bloated? Maybe I could set a maximum size for the markup and get a fail is I go over that.


• Ditto CSS file size.


• Ditt Javascript.


• Ditto images.


• If pages have associated feeds, then validate them as well according to the relevant specification (probably RSS or Atom).


• How many HTTP Requests does it take to load the whole page, including all the relevant assets.


• How many hosts are required to load the whole page? I’d like to be able to set a maximum number and get a fail if I go over that.


• Is the page gzipped on the server.


• And just to keep this topical, does the page have either the IE8 meta element or the associated HTTP header set to a particular value.

This sounds like setting up YSlow to run in a continous manner.