Like sands through the hourglass, this is the week of BostonJS. We have two (2) thrilling talks lined up for this Thursday, and—fun bit of trivia—zero (0) of them are from the talent pool here at Bocoup. That’s right: the BostonJS submission engine is gaining steam, but don’t go hot-gluing any brass gears to your tophats just yet—we still need you up there at our ramshackle lectern.

…It was a steampunk joke. The joke was… that we are “gaining steam,” but you shouldn’t… fully affect the garb of a steampunk enthusiast? With the gears and such, on a tophat. I guess. Okay whatever these descriptions are free anyway here are your speakers for the evening:

Making a book viewer from Google Books APIs
Kate deBethune

A short talk about how I put together a simple book viewer using a couple of Google Books APIs and which allows the user to perform keyword searches against the Google Books database and then select a book to preview in a viewer. Makes use of JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX, JSONP, and Google Books APIs.

Functional API Testing with NodeJS and Mocha
Daniel Bostwick

Few people test as much as they think they should, and even for those who often write tests, there is a lot of confusion around different types of tests, how to structure and name tests, or even what to test. 

In this talk, Daniel Bostwick will walk through how he structures a NodeJS project for testing, integrates the Mocha and Chai testing frameworks, discuss the guidelines he usesfor figuring out what to test, and show an examples of how to functionally test a backend API. You'll come away with a better knowledge of BDD, and hopefully inspired to better test your own APIs. 

All this and more, this Thursday night. Five dollars will get you an entire seat, but you’ll only need the edge.