Boost your Java Test with Ruby and JtestR

Posted by Sebastien Auvray on Jan 07, 2008

Sections

Development

Topics

Ruby ,

Java ,

Unit Testing

Tags

Buildr ,

Maven ,

Ant ,

RSpec ,

JRuby ,

Mocks

The ease of Ruby for scripting tasks makes it a very powerful candidate for writing your Test suites. Until recently, there was no real standalone framework to test your Java with Ruby. JtestR written by Ola Blini (a member of JRuby team) and Anda Abramovici makes it possible now.

The main project is a collection of Ruby libraries bundled together with JRuby integration. It also includes the well known libraries in the Ruby world: RSpec (for BDD), mocha (for mocking and stubbing), dust (descriptive block syntax test definition), Test/Unit, and ActiveSupport (Ruby utility classes).

You'll end up with test case looking like this (RSpec wise) :

import java.util.HashMap

describe "An empty", HashMap do
 before :each do
  @hash_map = HashMap.new
 end
 it "should be able to add an entry to it" do
  @hash_map.put "foo", "bar"
  @hash_map.get("foo").should == "bar"
 end
 it "should return a keyset iterator that throws an exception on next" do
  proc do
   @hash_map.key_set.iterator.next
  end.should raise_error(java.util.NoSuchElementException)
 end
end 

As an Ant task JtestR supports Ant, buildr and Maven2 integration.

Notice that JtestR relies on JRuby (which is still in heavy development) and that if you're running your tests often, you should set up the server Ant task to avoid JRuby heavy startup time (as described in the Getting Started tutorial).

With 0.1.1 version JtestR is in its early releases and your feedback will than welcome to guide its future direction.

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