Tuesday, 16 December 2008

New Mocking Frameworks (C++ and Java)

Over the last couple of months (maybe half a year) there's a big discussion whether TDD/AUT is here to stay or is it just a passing fashion.

I cant predict the future and as much as I believe in these concepts, only time will tell. However, since I'm paranoid by nature, I'm always on the lookout for indications that TDD is here to stay. A strong indication for me is the creation of new tools to help and simplify the writing of unit tests.

I don't know if this is a pure incident or if someone up there is orchestrating all these but during the last week I was introduced not to one but to two new tools out there. Both of them are new mocking frameworks.

The first one is a a mocking framework for C++ released by no other then Google! (named GoogleMock) this framework complete the unit testing framework Google release not too long ago (GoogleTest).

The second framework is a really cool mocking framework released for the Java language - PowerMock. Like JMockit and the .NET counterpart Isolator this framework is based on the principle of Interception (achieved by bytecode manipulation/CLR code injection)  and will allow mocking any (and I mean ANY) kind of method, including Static, Private and Final methods.

For me this has been a productive week for tool developers.

2 comments:

Soon Hui said...

Hopefully the release of GoogleMock is good enough to convince the managers who think that "writing unit tests are a waste of time".

Lior Friedman: said...

I think that you are right.
Saying that Google and Microsoft are doing it, is sometimes not enough.

Showing that they develop tools for this should do the trick.

 
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