Re: Classpath X project

[Chris Gray <gray at acunia dot com>]

Tom Tromey wrote:

> >>>>> ">" == Cafe Bliss <cafebliss@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> >> I haven't yet used either Mauve or J-Unit, but I'm
> >> wondering if you could briefly compare the two
> >> frameworks and describe why you prefer one or the
> >> other?
>
> I'd like to find out as well.  I've never looked at JUnit.
>
> Tom

Gerrit Ruelens knows more about this than I do, but he's
on holiday now so I'll try to summarise what he told me.

The Mauve mechanism is very simple and flexible.  You
can very easily subclass it to generate test reports in any
format you like -- for example we have a chain of
standard tools which generates a test coverage report
in Javadoc format, and hence in HTML.  Soon we'll be
using the same material to generate metrics for QA.

JUnit is a visual tool and seemed less flexible.  Maybe
there's some good ol' text-based steerin and reporting
stuff in there, but we didn't find it.  It also seems to be
more demanding in terms of what has to be working on
the system under test in order to be able to test it --
bit of a bummer trying to test your reflection code using
something which relies heavily on reflection and
introspection.

I may be maligning JUnit, so try to talk to someone who
is using it and see what they say.  Now that we have
10000+ tests running in the Mauve framework, we're
a little reluctant to review the decision. ;>

Regards

Chris Gray
VM Architect, ACUNIA