The Fenfire test system

Fenfire classes are generally supposed to have unit tests. If you're not familiar with unit tests, you may want to read the article, Test Infected: Programmers Love Writing Tests, by the developers of the well-known JUnit unit test framework.

To write unit tests for Fenfire, you need to know Jython, the Java-based implementation of the Python language. Writing tests in Jython is much faster than writing them in Java.

The test suite is run when you compile by typing ant. You can also run it independently by typing ant test.

We have hacked together our own unit test system, the code for which you can find in the org/fenfire/test/ directory in CVS. This system allows you to add new tests by simply creating a file inside the org/ tree whose suffix is .test. The convention is that a class XXX.java is tested by an XXX.test file in the same directory.

Test files are Python modules. After a test file has been loaded, the test system looks for methods in it whose name starts with test. (A method whose name is just test does count.) These are the test cases.

Each test case is run in three steps:

1. Execute module.setUp(), if it exists.
2. Execute module.testXXX().
3. Execute module.tearDown(), if it exists.

The setUp() and tearDown() methods are used to execute code that needs to be run before or after different tests in the file. For example,

def setUp():
    global x, y, z
    x = java.util.HashMap()
    y = java.util.TreeMap()
    z = java.io.FileInputStream("bla.txt")

def testSomething():
    y.put(z, z)
    x.put(z, y)

def testSomethingElse():
    x.put(z, z.read())

def tearDown():
    z.close()

If you include a docstring with a test, the first line is shown when the test is run, to give a more readable explanation of what the test is about.