Re: Title: JUnit 4.9b2 (beta-)released

>
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 4:32 PM, dgageot <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > Hi, everyone. Thank you for the good work.
>> >
>> > I was wondering, what made you choose TestRule to be an abstract class
>> and not an interface? This is so much of a pain.
>>
>
> JUnit4 provides a number of base classes for Rule implementations already
> (Verifier, ExternalResoruces, etc). Anyone wanting to reuse that behavior
> already had to lose the inheritance slot.
>

That's true. And I do prefer 'cannot inherit sometimes' than 'cannot inherit
ever'.


>  In your position, I'd also be frustrated.
>>
>> > The class being empty, I don't get it.
>>
>> The idea was to guide people away from an improper usage of Rules.
>> For example, calling Timeout.apply in the middle of a test method is
>> so likely to be the wrong thing to do, that we wanted to make it
>> difficult.  If there were some way for a rule to expose one interface
>> to the framework, and another to test writers, that would be ideal.
>> This seemed like the next-best solution.
>>
>
Seems logical to me. Didn't realize that the benefit was hidden in the
'protected' keyword :-)
We could check at runtime that the method is being called properly but that
would be less elegant and could be tricky.


>
>> > One of my custom Rules needs to extend a class already.
>
>
> I would also be interested in understanding the use case.
>
> Since there is only one method in TestRule, it's very easy to use
> delegation instead of inheritance to reuse the code in your base class.
>

The class I inherit from has dozens of methods. That's not the best use case
of delegation. However, I ended up doing exactly that.

Overall when I design code, I prefer interfaces over inheritance, but I
> believe we should optimize for developers that use Rules over developers
> that create new Rule implementations; it's by far the most common case. A
> large number of Java developers use IDEs, and having the IDE suggest a
> completion that a test should never call is a poor and confusing experience.
>

Agree 100%.

Thanks for the insights,

David.


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