Testing is a critical part of building any web application. It can also be one of the most frustrating parts, as developers look for bugs or other problems preventing their applications from working right.

It should be added that testing is hard enough on its own, and is only made more difficult if the platform or development environment you’re using isn’t optimized to help you in the task.

With that in mind, all of us on the Velo team have been looking at ways to improve and streamline testing for our users. So we’re rolling out a new way to test backend functions that should make it a much faster and simpler process.

Currently, if you wanted to test a backend function, you would need to create a temporary or unpublished page (or sometimes even a published page) to create a UI where you could test the function and make sure it’s working properly and returning the right values.

This is a cumbersome and unnecessary step, and we think we’ve come up with a great solution.

Now, whenever you have a backend function, such as a function in a .jws file or other backend code file, you’ll see a small green triangle next to it. Clicking it will take you into a purpose built UI that’s just for testing.

From here, it’s easy to add parameters to your function, run it, and quickly see the results.

We’re hosting a webinar on March 24th where you can see a live demo of the new feature. You can find out more about it and sign-up here.

The philosophy behind Velo is all about rapid development. This new testing function is aimed at accelerating what can be one of the most time consuming parts of development.

You can start testing backend functions today using the new functionality. Or, if you are using Velo yet, give it a try today, and see what you can build.