Re: Re: Testing external interfaces

From: "Adrian Howard"

> One alternative would be to have your own test W3 server and connect
> to that instead of the live server.
>
> I've occasionally done this sort of thing (using Perl's
> HTTP::Server::Simple) where responses from the live server are not
> deterministic enough to produce reliable test results.

Ruby's Webrick makes that absurdly simple. You could even go Webrick -> 
CGI -> your application in your language.

My MiniRubyWiki tests the server in several ways. One uses Watir to drive a 
Webrick session in another process. These lines allow the tests turn that 
process off when they don't need it any more:

    if 80 != port then
        server.mount_proc '/croak' do |request, response|
            croakServer(server, response)
        end
    end

If the Wiki runs on any port other than 80, for any reason (tests or 
manually), you can tell the server to turn itself off by hitting the page 
/croak . The server even returns a "goodbye!" page before it goes down.

Next, the best way to test thru the CGI or servlet channel is to avoid HTTP 
and mock some aspect of the server. For Webrick, I can instantiate a server 
in a "null" mode, so it doesn't waste time with TCP/IP. Then I call its 
methods do_GET() and do_POST(), and pass in mock request objects and 
response objects.

-- 
  Phlip
  http://www.greencheese.us/ZeekLand <-- NOT a blog!!! 



 
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