Re: Brain Dump of Towards FIT 1.0 OpenSpace session

--- [email protected] wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Al Chou" <[email protected]>
> To: "FIT Developers" <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 7:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [Fit-dev] Brain Dump of Towards FIT 1.0 OpenSpace session
> 
> 
> > --- [email protected] wrote:
> > >
> > > ----- Original Message ----- 
> > > From: "Al Chou" <[email protected]>
> > > To: "FIT Developers"
> <[email protected]>
> > > Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 5:18 PM
> > > Subject: RE: [Fit-dev] Brain Dump of Towards FIT 1.0 OpenSpace session
> > >
> > >
> > > > I couldn't find a saved message that made sense to reply to, so I'm
> adding
> > > it
> > > > to this thread.
> > > >
> > > > Lately I've been thinking more than usual about cross-language
> > > compatibility,
> > > > and I wonder whether anyone has mentioned trying to add BSF capability
> to
> > > FIT
> > > > or FitNesse so that any language that's been implemented in Java
> (Jython,
> > > > Tcl/Java [Jacl and/or Tcl Blend], JRuby, JScheme, and many many
> others) or
> > > can
> > > > do Java FFI could be used to write fixtures.  I was pleasantly
> surprised
> > > to
> > > > discover that a future version of Eclipse should have BSF included.
> > >
> > > Say what? I'm having a severe case of acronoym overload. What's
> > > a BSF, what's a FFI? I recognise Jython, so the rest of the languages
> > > in that clause are ok.
> > >
> > > In any case, Fitnesse doesn't care - writing fixtures in one language
> > > to drive an application in another language is a FIT issue.
> > >
> > > John Roth
> >
> > Sorry.
> >
> > BSF = Bean Scripting Framework, born at IBM, now at Apache
> > http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/
> >
> > FFI = foreign function interface
> >
> > I may have misunderstood, but I thought I had read remarks about FitNesse
> > calling fixtures written in languages other than Java.
> 
> Yes, it does, but what it does is call a driver in that language in its own
> process (using the Java equivalent of fork) so there is no language
> compatability issue. So, for example, there's a Java version of FIT,
> there's a .NET version of FIT, there's a Python version of FIT,
> and so forth. To invoke the Python versions, Fitnesse builds a
> command something like:
> 
> Python FitFilter.py <path stuff> <working directory>
> 
> and passes it the HTML on its stdin, getting the result HTML
> by reading the stdout and stderr.
> 
> John Roth


Thanks for the clarification, John.  OK, so let's substitute "FIT" for
"FitNesse" in my original question.  Rather than (or in addition to, for those
languages that have no Java compatibility) having FIT re-implemented in
numerous languages, why not have one core FIT that allows fixtures to be
written in whatever language you choose?  The original FIT is in Java, which
happens to have a lot of other languages implemented in it, but as long as an
interface was exposed that many other languages could work with, it wouldn't
matter what language the core FIT was written in (a recent thread on Ruby-talk
brings to mind the possibility that rather than exposing an
implementation-language-specific [e.g., Java or C] API, the public interface
could be XML-RPC, SOAP, or some other already-language-neutral technology).


Al

=====
Albert Davidson Chou

    Get answers to Mac questions at http://www.Mac-Mgrs.org/ .

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