Ted Naleid

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions!”
Now they have two problems. — Jaime Zawinski

There is a common and well-earned aversion in the Java world to regular expressions. Prior to Java 1.4, regular expressions weren’t even part of the core language. Post 1.4, using regular expressions is still a painful task of working with Pattern and Matcher objects. Lots of typing is involved to make anything happen. It’s difficult enough that most Java devs don’t end up using them enough to actually remember how to read a regular expression, and they need to dig up the JavaDocs (or cut and paste an old example), every time they want to use them.

This aversion has persisted into the Groovy community to a level that I haven’t seen in other dynamic scripting languages like Ruby, Python, and (obviously) Perl.

The current regexp docs that pop up when doing a google search are all outdated and don’t use any of the best techniques that are available in the groovy 1.5.X and 1.6-beta code that is now available. The recent Groovy Recipes book doesn’t have an entry for regular expressions in the index, and I was unable to find a single example of a regular expression in the entire book.

This is unfortunate because Groovy makes using regular expressions much easier than in Java. Under the covers, you’re still working with the same old Java Pattern and Matcher objects, but the Groovy syntax and additions to those classes are pleasant to work with.
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10 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / grails and groovy and unit testing

Glen Smith has been running a great series of posts this month to help people get started with unit testing. In that sprit, I thought I’d put out a post on some unit testing work that I’ve been doing recently.

There are a number of libraries and techniques for unit testing with groovy. It comes with MockFor and StubFor out of the box, and you can also leverage Java libraries like EasyMock and Mockito if your needs aren’t satisfied by the built-in constructs.

The mock and stub implementations that I mention above work well for allowing you to control the behavior of any collaborators, but what if your method calls another method within the same class? None of those solutions (as far as I’m aware) allow you to replace the behavior of other methods on the Class Under Test (CUT). If you are trying to unit test your method in true isolation, you need the ability to stub out the behavior of internal methods on the class (for example, to throw an exception to test try/catch logic).

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2 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / grails and groovy and unit testing

With Groovy built-in, Grails is one of the best platforms running on the JVM for doing unit testing.

One limitation that it does have is that the current testing scripts seem to be oriented more towards creating test reports rather than giving the user the quick feedback that is helpful when doing Test Driven Development.

Here’s an example of the output that you get on a failed test after running “grails test-app”:

-------------------------------------------------------
Running 1 Integration Test...
Running test BookTests...
testBookHasExpectedTitle...FAILURE
Integration Tests Completed in 622ms
-------------------------------------------------------
[junitreport] Transform time: 944ms
 
Tests failed: 0 errors, 1 failures, 0 compilation errors. View reports in /Users/ted/Documents/workspace/foobar/test/reports

Ok, that’s great…a test failed. But why? Where is the stacktrace and any output generated during the test?

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4 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / grails and groovy and osx and unit testing