Jean-Baptiste suggested in another thread that we consider moving to SMX4 for component testing, and this has also crossed my mind recently so we thought it bet to start a specific thread to discuss this.
I think it will certainly be a requirement to automate testing of components inside SMX4, but there are also some more immediate motivations for doing this in order to test components with updated dependencies used in SMX4. After using Pax Exam a bit lately with the SMX4 itests, I am wondering if that would be a suitable mechanism to test components with SMX4? I think this would certainly be a more accurate test of integration with the runtime than the current tests, although there will possibly be a performance penalty when running tests due to the more heavyweight nature. Alternatively, we could bootstrap some smaller chunk of SMX4 in order to perform more isolated tests without starting a full container. I am currently leaning towards using Pax Exam because it would provide a very accurate representation of the component running inside the container. This would include deployment and startup lifecycle, interaction with runtime dependencies, etc. which is slightly more accurate than the current tests. One final question is whether SMX4 provides an adequate test environment that is reciprocal with SMX3. We have been relying on SMX3 for testing components that are also deployed in SMX4, so is this also good enough the other way around or do we need to keep both? One of the downsides of the current tests is that many of the components have their own base tests that create the appropriate environment in which to test, and I think this has made the tests harder to maintain. I think one of the goals for this would be to make test authoring much easier. So what are everyone's thoughts on this? Thanks, Chris -- Chris Custine FUSESource :: http://fusesource.com My Blog :: http://blog.organicelement.com Apache ServiceMix :: http://servicemix.apache.org Apache Directory Server :: http://directory.apache.org
