[Solar-talk] Solar Testing via external test library

[Antti Holvikari]

On 10/4/06, Travis Swicegood <development at domain51.com> wrote:
> Howdy all,
>
> I've talked with Paul a bit about this and now I want to get the general
> consensus from everyone else.  The last few days I've spent a bit of
> time looking over the Solar_Test code.  From a testing standpoint,
> there's one large flaw in it.  It is coupled, and relies on, the code
> it's testing in order to work.  Because Solar_Test relies explicitly on
> the Solar class to handle it's loading, etc., testing becomes much harder.
>
> Also, there are large portions of the Solar_Test framework right now
> that are untested.  In looking over some of the solutions, we come close
> to having a full blown xUnit implementation inside Solar.  While there
> can never be too many testing frameworks out there, the KISS principle
> makes me think adopting one of two other xUnit testing would be the most
> pragmatic route.  The two testing frameworks we have available are
> SimpleTest and phpUnit2.  Of course, I'm partial to SimpleTest because
> I'm on the team there. :-)
>
> The downside to the external testing library is that Solar is now not
> completely self-contained or we throw another package into a Solar
> distribution.  I'm not sure having the testing framework external to
> Solar bothers me.  I would prefer to have a testing framework that's
> completely tested and have to download that in addition to Solar when/if
> I need to worry about testing Solar in a new environment or for an
> upgrade.  This actually isn't much of a hassle for me, however, because
> I always have SimpleTest in the includes path.
>
>
> So...  I guess here's the question.  What does everyone (or anyone?)
> think about using an external testing library to handle the tests in
> Solar?  I can write up a pretty quick scaffolding to handle tests in
> SimpleTest for Solar and get a patch out to the list if anyone's
> interested.  The was the test directory is structured right now, I could
> just add a tests/simpletest/ directory to contain the tests and start
> working from there alongside the existing tests and see where that gets us.
>
> Thoughts?  Comments?

Are you now talking about replacing Solar_Test completely or just
running the Solar_Test tests with an external testing library? Just to
be clear what you mean.


-- 
Antti Holvikari <http://phphalo.com>