I have just released version 0.4 of JtestR. This version doesn’t really provide any new features – instead it contains updates to all included libraries, upgrading JRuby to 1.2 being the most important one.
More information here: http://jtestr.codehaus.org.
JtestR allows you to test your Java code with Ruby frameworks.
Homepage: http://jtestr.codehaus.org
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jtestr
JtestR 0.3.1 is the current release of the JtestR testing tool. JtestR integrates JRuby with several Ruby frameworks to allow painless testing of Java code, using RSpec, Test/Unit, Expectations, dust and Mocha.
Features:
– Integrates with Ant, Maven and JUnit
– Includes JRuby 1.1, Test/Unit, RSpec, Expectations, dust, Mocha and ActiveSupport
– Customizes Mocha so that mocking of any Java class is possible
– Background testing server for quick startup of tests
– Automatically runs your JUnit and TestNG codebase as part of the build
Getting started: http://jtestr.codehaus.org/Getting+Started
New in the 0.3.1 release is upgrade of JRuby to revision r7479 which includes several new Java Integration features, upgrading of ActiveSupport to 2.1.0, fixing a severe memory leak in the background server and some minor usability features.
New and fixed in this release:
JTESTR-50 Difference in functionality when stubbing a method on a Java class vs a Ruby class using mocha
JTESTR-51 Mocking of classes lacking default constructors results in a NameError
JTESTR-53 Push the JtestR JRuby builds to maven repos
JTESTR-56 Upgrade ActiveSupport
JTESTR-57 Make it possible to use local versions of libraries.
JTESTR-59 No output when no tests found.
JTESTR-60 OutOfMemoryError
JTESTR-61 Documentation improvments – ant test-server
JTESTR-62 Having the jtestr.jar in the base directory doesn’t work
JTESTR-63 Update JRuby version
Justin Smestad uncovered an issue with JtestR that can cause some quite unintuitive output, and be hard to debug. Some info can be found here: http://www.evalcode.com/2008/08/jtestr-woes/ and here: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JTESTR-62. The issue has been fixed on trunk, but hasn’t been released yet. The issue is very simple – just make sure you don’t have the jtestr.jar file in the base directory where your project lives (this is usually the same place as the build.xml file). There are two ways to achieve this, either move the file into a directory or rename the file to something else.
I’ve just spent my first three days on a project in Leeds. It’s a pretty common Java project, RESTful services and some MVC screens. We have been using Mockito for testing which is a first for me. My immediate impression is quite good. It’s a nice tool and it allows some very clean testing of stuff that generally becomes quite messy. One of the things I like is how it uses generics and the static typing of Java to make it really easy to make mocks that are actually type checked; like this for example:
Iterator iter = mock(Iterator.class);stub(iter.hasNext()).toReturn(false); // Call stuff that starts interaction verify(iter).hasNext();
These are generally the only things you need to stub stuff out and verify that it was called. The things you don’t care about you don’t verify. This is pretty good for being Java, but there are some problems with it too. One of the first things I noticed I don’t like is that interactions that isn’t verified can’t be disallowed in an easy way. Optimally this would happen at the creation of the mock, instead of actually calling the verifyNoMoreInteractions() afterwards instead. It’s way to easy to forget. Another problem that quite often comes up is that you want to mock out or stub some methods but retain the original behavior of others. This doesn’t seem possible, and the alternative is to manually create a new subclass for this. Annoying.
Contrast this to testing the same interaction with Mocha, using JtestR, the difference isn’t that much, but there is some missing cruft:
iter = mock(Iterator) iter.expects(:hasNext).returns(false) # Call stuff that starts interaction
Ruby makes the checking of interactions happen automatically afterwards, and so you don’t have any types you don’t need to care about most stuff the way you do in Java. This also shows a few of the inconsistencies in Mockito, that is necessary because of the type system. For example, with the verify method you send the mock as argument and the return value of the verify-method is what you call the actual method on, to verify that it’s actually called. Verify is a generic method that returns the same type as the argument you give to it. But this doesn’t work for the stub method. Since it needs to return a value that you can call toReturn on, that means it can’t actually return the type of the mock, which in turn means that you need to call the method to stub before the actual stub call happens. This dichotomy gets me every time since it’s a core inconsistency in the way the library works.
Contrast that to how a Mockito like library might look for the same interaction:
iter = mock(Iterator) stub(iter).hasNext.toReturn(false) # Do stuff verify(iter).hasNext
The lack of typing makes it possible to create a cleaner, more readable API. Of course, these interactions are all based on how the Java code looked. You could quite easily imagine a more free form DSL for mocking that is easier to read and write.
Conclusion? Mockito is nice, but Ruby mocking is definitely nicer. I’m wondering why the current mocking approaches doesn’t use the method call way of defining expectations and stubs though, since these are much easier to work with in Ruby.
Also, it was kinda annoying to upgrade from Mockito 1.3 to 1.4 and see half our tests starting to fail for unknown reasons. Upgrade cancelled.
One question I’ve gotten a few times now that people are starting to use JtestR, is how to make it work with external libraries. This is actually two different questions, masquerading as one. The first one regard the libraries that are already included with JtestR, such as JRuby, RSpec or ActiveSupport. There is an open bug in JIRA for this, called JTESTR-57, but the reason I’ve been a bit hesitant to add this functionality until now, is because JtestR actually does some pretty hairy things in places. Especially the JRuby integration does ClassLoader magic that can potentially be quite version dependent. The RSpec and Mocha integration is the same. I don’t actually modify these libraries, but the code using them is a bit brittle at the moment. I’ve worked on fixing this by providing patches to the framework maintainers to include the hook functionality I need. This has worked with great success for both Expectations and RSpec.
That said, I will provide something that allows you to use local versions of these libraries, at your own risk. It will probably be part of 0.4, and if you’re interested JTESTR-57 is the one to follow.
The second problem is a bit more complicated. You will have seen this problem if you try to do “require ‘rubygems'”. JtestR does not include RubyGems. There are both tecnnical and non-technical reasons for this. Simply, the technical problem is that RubyGems is coded in such a way that it doesn’t interact well with loading things from JAR-packaged files. That means I can’t distribute the full JtestR in one JAR-file if I wanted RubyGems, and that’s just unacceptable. I need to be able to bundle everything in a way that makes it easy to use.
The non-technical reason is a bit more subtle. If RubyGems can be used in your tests, it encourages locally installed gems. It’s a bit less pain to do it that way initially, but remember that as soon as you check the tests in to version control (you are using version control, right?) it will break in unexpected ways if other persons using the code doesn’t have the same gems installed, with the same versions.
Luckily, it’s quite simple to work provide functionality to JtestR, even if no gems are used. The first step is to create a directory that contains all the third party code. I will call it test_lib and place it in the root of the project. After you have done that you must first unpack your gems:
mkdir test_lib cd test_lib jruby -S gem unpack activerecord
When you have the gems you want unpacked in this directory, you can add something like this to your jtestr_config.rb:
Dir["test_lib/*/lib"].each do |dir| $LOAD_PATH << dir end
And finally you can load the libraries you need:
require 'active_record'
JtestR allows you to test your Java code with Ruby frameworks.
Homepage: http://jtestr.codehaus.org
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jtestr
JtestR 0.3 is the current release of the JtestR testing tool. JtestR integrates JRuby with several Ruby frameworks to allow painless testing of Java code, using RSpec, Test/Unit, Expectations, dust and Mocha.
Features:
– Integrates with Ant, Maven and JUnit
– Includes JRuby 1.1, Test/Unit, RSpec, Expectations, dust, Mocha and ActiveSupport
– Customizes Mocha so that mocking of any Java class is possible
– Background testing server for quick startup of tests
– Automatically runs your JUnit and TestNG codebase as part of the build
Getting started: http://jtestr.codehaus.org/Getting+Started
The 0.3 release has focused on stabilizing Maven support, and adding new capabilities for JUnit integration.
New and fixed in this release:
JTESTR-47 Maven with subprojects should work intuitively
JTESTR-42 Maven dependencies should be automatically picked up by the test run
JTESTR-41 Driver jtestr from junit
JTESTR-37 Can’t expect a specific Java exception correctly
JTESTR-36 IDE integration, possibility to run single tests
JTESTR-35 Support XML output of test reports
Team:
Ola Bini – ola.bini@gmail.com
Anda Abramovici – anda.abramovici@gmail.com
And so, JtestR 0.2 has finally been released. The highlights include support for Expectations and TestNG, RSpec stories and lots of other goodies.
Here is the release announcement:
JtestR allows you to test your Java code with Ruby frameworks.
Homepage: http://jtestr.codehaus.org
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jtestr
JtestR 0.2 is the current release of the JtestR testing tool. JtestR integrates JRuby with several Ruby frameworks to allow painless testing of Java code, using RSpec, Test/Unit, Expectations, dust and Mocha.
Features:
– Integrates with Ant and Maven
– Includes JRuby 1.1, Test/Unit, RSpec, Expectations, dust, Mocha and ActiveSupport
– Customizes Mocha so that mocking of any Java class is possible
– Background testing server for quick startup of tests
– Automatically runs your JUnit and TestNG codebase as part of the build
Getting started: http://jtestr.codehaus.org/Getting+Started
New and fixed in this release:
JTESTR-10 It should be possible to run TestNG tests
JTESTR-12 Buildr support
JTESTR-13 CC.rb should be able to run JtestR tests
JTESTR-17 Tests should be groupable and runnable per groups
JTESTR-21 Support RSpec stories
JTESTR-28 JtestR should include expectations
JTESTR-30 code coverage support
JTESTR-31 Autoloading of Java constants
JTESTR-32 Can’t load IA 32-bit .so on a IA 32-bit platform
JTESTR-33 JtestR should use latest version of JRuby
JTESTR-34 Errors when project is in path with spaces on Windows XP
JTESTR-37 Can’t expect a specific Java exception correctly
JTESTR-38 Problem with mocking Java classes
JTESTR-39 RSpec story runner seems to require rubygems
JTESTR-40 Package missing or.jruby.exceptions.RaiseException
JTESTR-43 It should be possible to get the generated mock class without instantiation
JTESTR-44 New output files start with a whitespace
JTESTR-45 RSpec raise_error and Test/Unit assert_raise and assert_nothing_raised handled JRuby NativeException stuff correctly.
Team:
Ola Bini – ola.bini@gmail.com
Anda Abramovici – anda.abramovici@gmail.com
Someone asked in a comment where my Scala exploration were going. It’s a fair question.
I did a first implementation of the core of the system I was using. Most of if was tested using Specs (which incidentally is very good, and even more importantly – have a responsive creator). Now, I realized a while back that the implementation weren’t really using Scala properly. I had mostly used the imperative way of doing things. So I’m planning a rewrite of these parts, using pattern matchin, case classes and more recursive algorithms correctly. It’s kinda funny. I didn’t expect this to happen since I have so much experience with functional languages. But apparently, the fact that Scala looks like Java in many regards makes it very easy to slip into the Java imperative mode. Not good.
Right now I’m spending some time working on the next release of JtestR, writing on a book, and doing some pesky day time work. =) Also, JRuby needs to have its 1.1 release. I expect to get back to Scala within one or two weeks, though.
I’m spending some time working on version 0.2 of JtestR, which has the goal of rounding out the framework, adding some needed things like RSpec story support, test coverage metrics, TestNG running, groupability of tests, support for CC.rb and Expectations.
Now is the time to tell me if there’s anything you are missing from JtestR that stops you from using it! Either by a comment here or by the JtestR JIRA at http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JTESTR.
Thanks.
If people have wondered, this is what I have been working on in my spare time the last few weeks. But now it’s finally released! The first version of JtestR.
So what is it? A library that allows you to easily test your Java code with Ruby libraries.
Homepage: http://jtestr.codehaus.org
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jtestr
JtestR 0.1 is the first public release of the JtestR testing tool. JtestR integrates JRuby with several Ruby frameworks to allow painless testing of Java code, using RSpec, Test/Unit, dust and Mocha.
Features:
Getting started: http://jtestr.codehaus.org/Getting+Started
Team:
Ola Bini – ola.bini@gmail.com
Anda Abramovici – anda.abramovici@gmail.com
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I am a software developer working for Centro de AutonomÃa Digital, mainly with privacy, security and cryptography issues. I have worked on many different things in my life, including programming language design and implementation, security, privacy and cryptography, artificial intelligence and more. |
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