Currently, npm is the package manager for the frontend world. Sure, there are alternatives, but for the time being, npm seems to have won. Even tools like Bower are being pushed to the wayside in favor of the One True Package Manager, but what’s most interesting to me is npm’s relatively novel approach to dependency management. Unfortunately, in my experience, it is actually not particularly well understood, so consider this an attempt to clarify how exactly it works and how it affects you as a user or package developer.

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Modern web applications are often built as single-page apps, which are great for keeping concerns separated, but problematic when tested. Logic needs to be duplicated in front- and back-end test suites, and if the two apps diverge, the tests won't catch the failure. I haven't found a very good solution to this problem aside from brittle, end-to-end integration tests.

To attempt to address a fraction of this problem, I built factory_girl_api, a way to share context setup between both sides of the application.

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