Sunday, September 30, 2007

JFace Data Binding Conformance Tests

I'm a bit of a test junky. I don't necessarily enjoy writing them but I can't do without them. They're a necessity and I consider a team's attitude toward unit testing a metric of assessing a project's health. One of my post 1.0 ambitions was to create a solid testing infrastructure to ease the burden of writing tests for JDB and to not start over every time a new observable is written. Another part of this was that I wanted to expose the infrastructure to our consumers so that you don't have to duplicate the some of the tediousness we have gone through in order to ensure the proper behavior of our implementations.

As a result org.eclipse.jface.tests.databinding.conformance has been created. An introduction of the ideas and how to consume the project can be found on the Eclipse Wiki at JFace Data Binding/Conformance Tests. The main idea is that you provide a delegate that allows us to interact with your observable. You then select the TestCases to run and we will handle the rest. The conformance tests are JUnit3 based and should integrate into any existing JUnit testing framework. The project should be considered alpha and 1.0 is tentatively scheduled to be released with Eclipse 3.4. Any and all feedback is welcome.

Happy testing.