[Raleigh-talk] Testing

[Nathan L. Walls]

On Feb 4, 2009, at 3:57 PM, Michael Peters wrote:

> Nathan L. Walls wrote:
>
>> We've used Test::Unit, but consensus is there's too little benefit  
>> for creating/running harnesses for Test::Unit vs. using prove.
>
> Yeah, Test::Unit is a dead project. The Perl world is pretty heavily  
> in bed with TAP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
> Test_Anything_Protocol) which is fine by me. Instead of the harness  
> running the tests directly, it's a protocol which allows the tests  
> and the harness to communicate about what happened. It's a nice  
> decoupling because it means you can test other things besides just  
> Perl scripts, like a web API or a database (there's pgTAP for  
> PostgreSQL).
>
> If you want the same basic organization of xUnit style tests, I'd  
> recommend Test::Class. It gives you the same setup/teardown/,  
> startup/shutdown hooks as well as letting you group related tests  
> into methods. And it outputs TAP so it works with the rest of the  
> Perl testing infrastructure.


Ah, good to know. It's been that long since I've even looked at  
writing Test::Unit tests. We had a detour into Ruby and rspec before  
returning to part of our Perl codebase. Our love for unit testing  
developed during that time is just catching up with us again.

Nathan