Any number of times I have wanted to reuse the "logic" of the unit test plugin (maven-test-plugin) for integration or system or acceptance testing. The solutions that I have come up with have invariably been ugly. Other people have had the same idea, there is a strange maven-itest-plugin that floats around, currently I think it lives in a plugin sandbox directory under SVN.
One of the problems with the itest plugin is that it is a poor man's cut and paste copy of the test plugin. It lacks some of the details that the test plugin's authors very carefully constructed. It is a copy because the logic of the test plugin has hard coded values for some of its properties, they are set from values in the POM, e.g. the value of the unitTestSourceDirectory property, and no override mechanism is provided. A reasonable approach might be to rewrite the test plugin (and any others with similar characteristics) so that the value of each plugin property could be set by the caller, even if each property has been initialized with a well defined default value, e.g. a POM property. The defaults would remain set to support the existing behavior, but an override mechanism will allow existing plugins to be directly reused for additional purposes, e.g. integration, system or acceptance testing, or to participate in the construction of larger grained tasks via plugin nesting. The java and the test plugins are used in that way by a number of the test coverage plugins. I have thought about doing such a rewrite a number of times, I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and do it in the next couple of weeks. If anyone has any specific requirements that they would like to see addressed, please reply to this post and I will do my best. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
