[seam-dev] the parody of mocks in JSF

[Dan Allen]

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Jay Balunas <tech4j at gmail.com> wrote:

> You may also want to check out
> http://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/TestDrivenJSFDevelopment
>
> Alex Smirnov has been working on this to help with RF 4.0 development.
> Perhaps we can collaborate.


Awesome. So I'm not alone in my thinking that we need a solution.

Another initiative that is just getting started is faces-tester by Jason
Lee. http://kenai.com/projects/facestester

I see two requirements. One is that you are interacting with the JSF API to
validate your framework or business code. For instance, I have tests in Seam
3 right now that validate that the EL resolver is working correctly, ones
that validate that FacesMessage objects are created and registered and ones
that test that a component can be found by id in a programmatically created
tree.

Then there is the view and UI component stuff (but not functional testing
like Selenium or JSFUnit). That is where faces-tester and/or jsf-test are
needed. They reach into the JSF view layer and begin executing the component
renderers.

We absolutely need both. And it's time to get serious and have a definitive
library rather than just spinning off a homegrown mock everytime we need to
write a test. I'm going to be looking into both of these projects as I add
tests to Seam 3.

-Dan


>
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Dan Allen <dan.j.allen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It's hard to believe that for as long as JSF has been around, the only
>> decent repository of mocks for the JSF API comes not from the
>> implementation, but rather from all but dead and irrelevant project at
>> Apache (Shale). Of course, Seam 2 forged it's own path and has a healthy set
>> of mocks, although still somewhat incomplete and vagrant. In the Seam 3
>> spirit of modularity, I would like to migrate the Seam 2 mocks into a mock
>> module in Seam 3 that provides mock/stub object for various Java EE APIs. I
>> plan to categorize them by spec under the org.jboss.seam.mock folder
>>
>> JSF - org.jboss.seam.mock.faces
>> Servlet - org.jboss.seam.mock.servlet
>> etc
>>
>> This module should not depend on any other module so that it is easy to
>> reuse, perhaps even outside of the Seam framework. Perhaps seam-mock can end
>> up replacing Shale test. Who knows. We'll just let it play out. Please
>> contribute your ideas/use cases!
>>
>> http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/seam/modules/trunk/mock/
>>
>> As for the functionality, my feeling is that the mocks should be
>> functional as long as each class behaves like a bean. That means it
>> shouldn't parse XML documents or make similar assumptions. But they should
>> be easy enough to extend that perhaps you can add that functionality in your
>> test case or we can think about providing an additional subclass or helper
>> if the need is common (perhaps parsing an web.xml document).
>>
>> -Dan
>>
>> --
>> Dan Allen
>> Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat | Author of Seam in Action
>>
>> http://mojavelinux.com
>> http://mojavelinux.com/seaminaction
>> http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Dan
>>
>> NOTE: While I make a strong effort to keep up with my email on a daily
>> basis, personal or other work matters can sometimes keep me away
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>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> blog: http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Jay
>



-- 
Dan Allen
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat | Author of Seam in Action

http://mojavelinux.com
http://mojavelinux.com/seaminaction
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Dan

NOTE: While I make a strong effort to keep up with my email on a daily
basis, personal or other work matters can sometimes keep me away
from my email. If you contact me, but don't hear back for more than a week,
it is very likely that I am excessively backlogged or the message was
caught in the spam filters.  Please don't hesitate to resend a message if
you feel that it did not reach my attention.
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