Pols Consulting

Writing build tools is a nightmare these days. As the recent post on mockobjects.com points out, there are just sooooo many different java test frameworks to choose form (Junit 3, Junit4, TestNG, EasyMock, JMock1, and JMock2…).

Thankfully there will soon be a solution at hand…. The post explains that commons.testing and commons.mocking will provide a common, framework-agnostic API for writing tests and using mock objects.

Developers will be able to write to a single API and then select a test framework and mock object library to execute the tests at runtime by annotating their tests with the commons.testing annotations, writing a few dozen lines of XML configuration.

Furthermore, commons.testing can run tests that are defined entirely by XML configuration files instead of complex Java code. This will enable IT departments to greatly reduce the cost of pair programming and test driven development by having lower-cost, non-technical staff author the test cases that specify what the developers must implement in Java.

I think this is a little simplistic. The commons team have missed a trick. It’s not just testing frameworks that vary. There’s also a plethora of development tools that need to support commons.testing before developers can start using it in anger. What we really need is a commons.plugin framework.

With this, a cool new open-source project would automatically work on all development tools (IDEA, Eclipse, Bamboo, Cruise Control, Ant, Maven…). Now we’re talking…