I recently completed an acceptance test framework for my company, Spoke.
The framework is built off of JWebUnit and HttpUnit and provides a single SpokeTestCase that all acceptance tests must extend. The setUp() method of SpokeTestCase does the following:
- connects to the DB
- drops all open connections using a stored procedure
- restores the DB from a backup that was in CVS (copied via the network filesystem)
- makes a GET call to our 3 servers and instructs them to “reset”, causing a new connection pool and caches to be cleared
- sets the base URL for JWebUnit to http://localhost
Because our DB backup snapshot is small and our 3 servers are only started once (right before running the test suite), the overhead for each test is around 3 seconds. This allows us to run several thousand tests over night.
One interesting project I’d like to integrate with is FIT. The concept of providing a JWebUnit-style interface to a Wiki such that non-engineers could write some tests is very appealing.
One particular project that looks utterly useless to me is
Jameleon. Mike Cannon-Brookes pointed it out to me, and while Mike is generally a smart guy, he’s smoking crack on this one. Honestly, how does this look at all useful to anyone:
<jmln:httpunit-session application="tutorial">
<jmln:jmln-tutorial-home-page
functionId="load start page"
tutorialHomePageLinkText="here"
tutorialHomePageTitle="Jameleon Tutorial - Start"/>
</jmln:httpunit-session>
I think that JWebUnit does a GREAT job and making things very manageable. FIT is nice for providing an extra layer on top of that so that non-coders can get involved. Jameleon doesn’t seem to offer anything to me except a very large migrane. Am I the only one missing the point?
on Oct 18th, 2003 at 3:36 am
Yes you are missing the point, but I guess that’s my fault for not explaining the concepts well enough. Without going into too much detail, the basic idea of Jameleon is reuse.
I guess I thought I documented this well enough on the home page, but apparently I didn’t. Creating test cases really starts to fly once a few functional points are generated.
on Jul 22nd, 2004 at 2:54 am
JWebunit already has an extension to be a fit fixture… get Fitnesse http://www.fitnesse.org – check out the source for jwebunit from sourceforge CVS and build the fit plugin…
on Aug 28th, 2006 at 10:28 am
I haven’t used it yet, but am pretty psyched. One important thing that wasn’t mentioned is that one of its test framework plugins claims to give full support of DOM and also activeX controls. As of yet, I think the only other way to test an activeX control would be to use Mercury’s QuickTestPro…which is commercial and expensive.