A natural progression of the great http://todomvc.com but for the full stack! With pluggable front and backends written against a hardened API. Nice work!
I can't take this seriously without proper tests. In the Real World, none of this code would have been approved and deemed ready for production without proper test coverage, even for simple CRUD, imo.
But seriously, these apps are large enough where adding in testing initially would only complicate the core mission: to show the common software patterns that are required for day to day development.
Updating this with a more eloquent answer (averaging 4 hours of sleep this week, so original comment was not my finest commentary on the matter :)
I think tests are a good idea, and I’m a huge fan of TDD in general. Building Conduit implementations without tests are a large time investment as is, so we originally didn’t include testing in the spec because we figured that if people wanted it, then it would be a great “extra credit” objective for the repo. For example, the Angular 2 repo had a request for unit tests and folks are now starting to work on a PR for it.
Another reason we didn’t include them in the spec is actually from this line in the current spec:
> The quality & architecture of Conduit implementations should reflect something similar to an early stage startup's MVP: functionally complete & stable, but not unnecessarily over-engineered.
Most startups I know that work in consumer facing apps (like Conduit) don’t apply TDD until they have solid product-market fit, which is smart because they then spend most of their time iterating on product & UI and thus are far more likely to find PMF.
This doesn’t mean that TDD === over-engineering, but in certain circumstances that statement does evaluate true (ex: consumer product finding PMF, sideprojects, robust prototypes, etc).
So TL;DR — we chose to not have a strict requirement for TDD in these repos, but we'd definitely prefer all of them to include excellent tests if the maintainers are willing to add it (or if someone in the community is kind enough to make a pull request :)
I'm actually working on the Vue.js implementation (with some help from a few other folks already) and am doing my best to write tests as I go. Learning a new framework while following TDD is a little challenging though.
Look at upcoming implementations or request your favorite stack here: https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld/issues