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Intern vs AVA comparison of testing frameworks
What are the differences between Intern and AVA?

Intern

https://github.com/theintern/intern

AVA

https://github.com/avajs/ava
Programming language

JavaScript

JavaScript

Category

Unit Testing, Functional Testing

Unit Testing, Intergration Testing

General info

Intern is minimal test system for JavaScript designed to write and run consistent.

Intern is a complete test system for JavaScript designed to help you write and run consistent, high-quality test cases for your JavaScript libraries and applications. Using Intern we can write tests in JavaScript and TypeScript using any style like TDD, and BDD. Intern can run unit tests in most browsers that support ECMAScript

Futuristic, new, fast and concurrent JavaScript test runner with simple test syntax

AVA is a test runner for Node.js with a concise API, detailed error output. JS is a single-threaded but Node.JS is a parallel due to it's async behaviour. Ava leverages that and it can run tests concurrently
xUnit
Set of frameworks originating from SUnit (Smalltalk's testing framework). They share similar structure and functionality.

No

No

However Ava supports the TAP format which allows us to use the tap-xunit reporter to produce xUnit (JUnit) XML
Client-side
Allows testing code execution on the client, such as a web browser

Yes

Intern is a complete test system for JavaScript It Runs in the browser and can test any front-end component and functionality

Yes

You can write tests for the DOM with Ava, testing front-end components is easy with Ava
Server-side
Allows testing the bahovior of a server-side code

Yes

Since it is a complete testing system that can test any type of JavaScript code, it can test server-side behaviour and components as well

Yes

Ava utilizes the async I/O nature of Node and runs concurrent tests on NodeJs applications' back-endsA node server can have its endpoints tested with Ava
Fixtures
Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data (fixtures) that are test-local. This ensures specific environment for a single test

N/A

Yes

Using Ava's ava-fixture library it supports fixtures
Group fixtures
Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data for a group of tests (group-fixtures). This ensures specific environment for a given group of tests.

N/A

Yes

Ava has support for group fixtures
Generators
Supports data generators for tests. Data generators generate input data for test. The test is then run for each input data produced in this way.

N/A

Licence
Licence type governing the use and redistribution of the software

FreeBSD License

MIT License

Mocks
Mocks are objects that simulate the behavior of real objects. Using mocks allows testing some part of the code in isolation (with other parts mocked when needed)

Intern uses the Dojo Toolkit’s AMD loader. To mock, you should be able to just use the standard AMD 'map' feature, else you can use third party libraries like sinon.js

AVA has no mocking built in, to mock functions you can use third party libraries like Sinon.js.
Grouping
Allows organizing tests in groups

Yes

You can group tests into Suites which may be specified as file paths or using glob expressions, there is typically one top-level suite per module.

No

There is no support for grouping tests
Other
Other useful information about the testing framework