[hunchentoot-devel] Unit testing Hunchentoot websites

[Vamsee Kanakala]

Slava Akhmechet wrote:
> Thanks! This is essentially what I wanted to do but you handed it to
> me on a silver platter :) One question though, why do you create a
> dummy-request class instead of using hunchentoot's? You could also
> derive something like unittest-request if you need some special
> functionality.
> 

If I remember correctly, instantiating hunchentoot::request directly is
a bit of a problem as it depends on things like headers-in to be set
properly, which needs the server to be started, or at least instantiate
a hunchentoot::server object. It didn't seem very efficient as I would
be running hundreds of tests, and many of them use request params. So I
wanted something very simple to just mock hunchentoot::request's
behavior in setting and retrieving params. And I was also too lazy to
see if a more generic approach could be taken to this :). So yes,
unittest-request looks like a good idea.

> Would it make sense to add some functions to Hunchentoot that would
> provide a public API to do this? This way everyone can unit-test
> Hunchentoot apps in the same standard way.
> 

Though I can't say I had a detailed look all the unit test frameworks
available out there, but I wasn't satisfied with the ones available, so
basically I wrote my own on top of Peter Seibel's code in his PCL book.
So a unit test framework that is more web-oriented,
hunchentoot-compatible seems like a great idea.

Actually there are a couple of times I thought of writing about the same
issue to this list, but one thing I was very short on time, and some
meddling around seemed to solve my problem. Since you're writing a web
framework based on Hunchentoot, seems like we're solving the same
problems (I'm adding these bits as I write my webapp) - would love to
collaborate where I can.


Regards,
Vamsee.