Hi everyone, I wanted to take a second and direct your attention to a new library I'm working on in the Maven sandbox. I'm calling it maven-plugin-test-tools, and it's meant to make the process of integration-testing a Maven plugin much simpler, using test builds. This idea has been implemented in a variety of ways in the recent past - actually going back quite some time in the maven-eclipse-plugin - but I'm attempting to learn from the quirks and oddities in each attempt, and come up with a single API that developers will find convenient for conducting these types of tests.
I've modified the tests in the maven-eclipse-plugin (okay, they're currently *unit* tests, but we can fix that) to use this new library, so you can use the AbstractEclipsePluginTest as an example. Also, I've put together some documentation on the testing library in the form of a main index APT that describes the approach, and a set of relatively complete JavaDocs for each specific testing tool...they're here: http://people.apache.org/~jdcasey/maven-plugin-test-tool If any of you have time to review this site (and maybe the source and eclipse plugin example usage) and provide feedback or ideas, I'd really love to hear from you. I think it's absolutely critical to get plugin testing under control, and provide some standardized mechanisms to make the lives of plugin developers simpler. I'd like to keep fleshing this library out, and start converting more of the existing plugins in Maven's SVN to use this testing approach (along with a more well-suited approach to unit testing, perhaps using EasyMock). WDYT? Thanks, John
