* Adrian Howard <adrianh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2006-08-16 14:35]:
> On 15 Aug 2006, at 19:29, Michael Peters wrote:
> >I think this is the most important benefit. Test runs aren't
> >bound to the single time it was run with a certain harness.
> >They can be captured and viewed later by the same developer or
> >shared among developers.
>
> Nothing stopping you doing this with JUnit/TestNG/whatever
> either. You don't have a protocol, but you do have a standard
> set of class based APIs.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to prefer a well-defined and
simple wire formats over APIs. :-) In a sense, it’s declarative,
rather than imperative. Integration of heterogenous systems is
much easier that way – even subsystems for which no explicit
format emitter is available can participate without much trouble.
You can easily scale the complexity of the participants at either
end of the wire to match your needs. At one extreme of the scale,
you might telnet to your smoke server and manually tap in (pun
intended) “ok 1”, “not ok 2” responses. Then you can go through
scripts which manually `print "ok 1"` through Test::More all the
way to Test::Class. Your infrastructure can be as simple or
complex as you want or need.
I think this is a powerful benefit.
> Not that hard to stick a proxy/recorder type thang in the
> middle.
Yes, but you have to make extra effort and possibly hack a
little. With TAP, you get that for free. As the name implies,
you can test everything, and with minimum fuss.
Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
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