A few interesting tools/technologies I encountered in preparation for Andela’s Bootcamp
In the course of preparing for Andela’s Bootcamp, I have come in contact with a few interesting tools — tools that I have never worked it or even imagine before. These tools include the following:
Postman, Travis CI, Coveralls, postgreSQL, and testing tools like mocha and chai.
Postman: According to Postman’s official website, it is a toolchain that can help build software that is useful across various use cases ranging from a single developer to an enterprise. Postman was built for the future where everything is going to be connected.
The Postman free app was created as a side project, and first introduced in October 2012. It grew quickly to become one of the most popular apps on the Chrome store and expanded to Mac, Windows, and Linux native apps.
You can read more on Postman here.
Travis CI: According to Wikipedia, Travis CI is a hosted, distributed continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted at GitHub. Open source projects may be tested at no charge while Private projects may also be tested on a fee basis.
Travis CI is configured by adding a file named .travis.yml, which is a YAML format text file, to the root directory of the repository the individual or team is working on. This file specifies the programming language used, the desired building and testing environment (including dependencies which must be installed before the software can be built and tested), and various other parameters.
You can read more on Travis CI here.
PostgreSQL: According to Wikipedia, PostgreSQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and standards compliance. It can handle workloads ranging from single-machine applications to Web services or data warehousing with many concurrent users. It is the default database for macOS Server and is also available for Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows.
PostgreSQL is ACID-compliant and transactional. It offers support for RDBMS features such as updatable and materialized views, triggers, foreign keys; functions and stored procedures.
PostgreSQL is developed by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, a diverse group of many companies and individual contributors. It is free and open-source software released under a permissive software license.
You can visit PostgreSQL official website to know more.
Mocha and Chai: Mocha is a JavaScript test framework for Node.js programs, featuring browser support, asynchronous testing, test coverage reports, and can use any assertion library.
Mocha can be used with most JavaScript assertion libraries such as should.js, express.js, chai, better-assert, unexpected. For my Bootcamp project, I used chai because of its flexibility. Chai has several interfaces that allow the developer to choose the most comfortable. These interfaces include should, expect and assert.
