Languages and Frameworks 83. Playwright Adopt With Playwright you can write end-to-end tests that run in Chrome, Firefox and WebKit. By using the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) Playwright can offer new features and eliminate many of the issues seen with WebDriver. Using the same API eliminates many of the issues that WebDriver has and introduces a set of new features. Chromium-based browsers implement CDP directly. To support Firefox and Webkit, though, the Playwright team has to submit patches to these browsers, which may sometimes limit the framework. Playwright’s many features include: Built-in auto-waits, which result in tests that are more reliable and easier to understand; browser contexts, which let you test that persisting sessions across tabs work properly; and the ability to simulate notifications, geolocation and dark mode settings. Our teams are impressed with the stability Playwright brings to the test suite and like that they get feedback more quickly by running tests in parallel. Other features that set Playwright apart include better support for lazy loading and tracing. Although Playwright has some limitations — component support is currently experimental, for example — our teams consider it the go-to test framework and in some cases are migrating away from Cypress and Puppeteer. 84. .NET Minimal API Trial ASP.NET core MVC has proven to be a powerful and flexible approach for building web applications that host APIs. However, its flexibility brings a certain amount of complexity with it, including boilerplate and conventions that aren’t always obvious. The routing provided by ASP.NET allows multiple services to be hosted in a single application, but in today’s world of serverless functions and independently deployable microservices, that flexibility might be overkill. .NET Minimal APIs provide a simple approach to implementing a single-API web application in the .NET ecosystem. The Minimal API framework can implement an API endpoint with just a few lines of code. Minimal API joins the new generation of API frameworks — including Micronaut, Quarkus and Helidon — which are optimized for lightweight deployments and fast startup times. We’re interested in the combination of Minimal APIs and .NET 7 Native AOT for implementing simple, lightweight microservices in serverless functions. 85. Ajv Trial Ajv is a popular JavaScript library used to validate a data object against a structure defined using a JSON Schema. Ajv is fast and flexible for validating complex data types. It supports a wide range of schema features, including custom keywords and formats. It’s used by many open-source JavaScript applications and libraries. Our teams have used Ajv for implementing consumer-driven contract testing in CI workflows, and, along with other tools for generating mock data with the JSON Schema, it’s very powerful. In the TypeScript world, Zod is a popular alternative that has a declarative API for defining the schema and validating the data. © Thoughtworks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 40