Re: Objective-C Unit Testing under linux

[Marcel Weiher]

On Wednesday, March 19, 2003, at 07:58  Uhr, Travis Griggs wrote:

> I'm frustrated with my inability to lay my hands on an easy to 
> install/understand/use unit tester for objective-c, running under 
> linux. I'm using the GNUstep base/makefiles stuff as a core library 
> under Linux. There are (2?) objc-unit testing frameworks, but they 
> seem to be very apple/osx/graphic centric. I just want something 
> simple. Command line based. I toyed with porting ObjcUnit, but it had 
> _lots_ of classes, was based off of JUnit. Being a veteran 
> Smalltalker, but newbie objc'er, I'd like something a little more 
> Smalltalk centric. Am I just going to have to write my own?

Try MPWTest.  It is the simplest unit testing framework I could think 
of, and I get pretty extreme when it comes to simplicity.  You can get 
it from

        http://www.metaobject.com/downloads/Objective-C/

(the tgz is 6.3 KBytes...;-)

If you want to see how it is used, download the MPWFoundation from the 
same place.  In a nutshell, each class that wants to be tested defines 
a +testSelectors method which returns an NSArray of NSStrings which are 
the selectors to send.  In the default case, these selectors are sent 
to the class and the tester checks for exceptions.  No exception means 
the test passed.

The implementation allows some flexibility in that the class can choose 
to handle the named tests differently (which I use to run various 
Postscript test files through my Postscript interpreter), or you can 
return a different object to actually run the tests (an initialized 
instance, for example).  But that is fairly rare.

Per default, the entitites tested are frameworks (any loadable bundle 
will do), which are assumed to live in (or at least have ghosts in) 
/Library/Frameworks/.  You simply run  testlogger  on the command line, 
providing as arguments the names of all the frameworks you want to test.

testlogger_main.m
Description: Binary data

Thinking...well, with GNUstep, I think I didn't actually have the 
time/nerve to try and get the unit-testing framework running, because 
it uses some runtime trickery to figure out which classes to test.  So 
instead, I just wrote a little program that ran the tests "per pedes".  
So I guess my testing framework wasn't really minimal, because the 
following is a "sufficient" (if not entirely elegant) replacement for 
it.

testall.m
Description: Binary data

--
Marcel Weiher                           Metaobject Software Technologies
marcel@metaobject.com           www.metaobject.com
Metaprogramming for the Graphic Arts.   HOM, IDEAs, MetaAd etc.