Back story

Contrary to unpopular belief, every sidekick deserves a back story.

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It all started with a sweet BDD tool, Jasmine, crafted by the awesome pivots at Povital Labs.

During my first few weeks with Jasmine, all was well. However, since I like to develop in vertical slices, I noticed that I missed having the ability to define specs as say "Features" or "Stories". I also could not stand the default output style of the TrivialReporter (Html).

I decided to create two projects to address these issues. jasmine-aroma and jasmine-bloom.

Technically, jasmine-aroma begun life as Jasminex -- it was simply a spike to see if something like this would be feasible and to guage how much benefit it would provide in my JavaScript projects. It turned out great. Being able to describe behaviors for Features by employing the alternate grammar of "given, when, then" made it easier for me to visualize the code I'm building. Also I was able to tweak the output of the TrivialHtmlReporter to make the report less rigid when dealing with the more "exotic" spec suites. Since I enjoyed having alternate grammar styles to choose from, I figured I had to share. There had to be one other person like me who could benefit. So I started jasmine-aroma. Of course I'm BDDing the hell out of it. Not that difficult considering I'm simply wrapping existing friendly functionality in other friendly faces.

Jasmine-aroma contained some additions to jasmine to make it more suitable for alternate approaches to BDD. Aroma aimed to provide an alternative for developers who find BDD to be more rewarding when using multiple grammatical styles to shape/approach the behavior of code.

Jasmine-bloom focused on the UI. The Html reporting output and the styles used to display the suites and specs.

After most of the work had been done to get these projects to stable private betas, I decided to merge them into one project to make them easier to manage. This is the Jasmine Species project.

The name alludes to the (well known?) fact that there are multiple species of the Jasmine plant. This project allows developers to experience the different flavors, aromas and blooms that are naturally possible with Jasmine. Ok that's just plain cheesy.