dnode

Yes, DNode (https://github.com/substack/dnode) will actually do most of this stuff and it is a pluggable library. For Joint, we wanted to make a really clean interface just for single page apps where you're only focusing on function calls rather than HTTP headers, cookies, routes, etc. A lot of the small 1-off apps we were making and thinking of making just had a couple HTTP requests for static files then a bunch of AJAX or socket.io calls. We think that in this case, the limitations imposed by Joint will help inspire creative solutions.

Check out tap, it has a very simple api that works well for testing asynchronous code: https://github.com/isaacs/node-tap Here's a tap example that sets up a server and client for dnode: https://github.com/substack/dnode/blob/master/test/single.js Timers usually aren't necessary with test harnesses like tap or nodeunit since you need to call `t.end()` explicitly or else `t.plan()` the number of tests that are supposed to be run. If a different number of tests actually run or assertions fire after `t.end()` is called, those are reported as errors. For (4), to run a bunch of test files in a directory you can use the `tap` command. You can even add something like `tap test/*.js` to the scripts.test field of a package.json file and then to run all your tests you can just do `npm test`.

Here are some of Mojito's existing Node.JS counterparts: * https://github.com/substack/dnode * https://github.com/tblobaum/nodeQuery * https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream