[Solar-talk] tests in the browser

[Travis Swicegood]

Hi all,

Clay Loveless wrote:
>  From yesterday's threads, it seems like some folks are running Solar  
> unit tests in the browser rather than on the command line.
>
> I'd never done that until this morning -- I'd always just run them on  
> the command line, and based on that, don't think I'd have ever known  
> about potential Apache crashes, etc.
>
> I tweaked the 'test.php' file in the dev branch a little bit to make  
> output a little more readable, and to allow running a single test  
> suite in a browser instead of the whole thing.
>
> For example:
>
> test.php?Solar_Markdown_Plugin_Html
>
>
> If a lot of people are running tests in the browser, I'd be  
> interested to know about that...

What about using a reporter to handle the output for tests a la 
SimpleTest?  test.php could be your standard and it could do some 
detection to figure out which reporter to run by default, but then it 
gives the user a little more flexibility in how they view the test results.

Here's a sample API:

$suite = Solar::factory('Solar_Test_Suite', $config);
// setup reporter to display test output.
if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST]) {
    $suite->setReporter(Solar::factory('Solar_Test_Reporter_HTML', 
$config));
}
else {
    $suite->setReporter(Solar::factory('Solar_Test_Reporter_Text', 
$config));
}

// run the test series
$series = isset($argv[1]) ? trim($argv[1]) : null;
$suite->run($series);


Of course, this opens it up to all kinds of fun things.  Email or SMS 
reporters, an "upgrade" reporter that's used by a script that does an 
svn update, runs the test and the reporter automatically knows to kill 
the test on any failure, revert out the updated scripts, and report the 
message via email/SMS.  Another reporter we use at SimpleTest is the XML 
reporter which can be used to chain tests together (I execute a test 
script on my machine, it grabs the XML results from all of my servers, 
parses those and reports back).

Anyhow, just some ideas for long term directions this could go.
-Travis