Faça seus Testes Falarem TAP (Make your Tests Speak TAP) article published in MundoJ, issue 47, March/April 2011

This is my first article for a Brazilian magazine! :-D It was published in this month’s issue of MundoJ magazine (previously called MundoJava).

In this article Cesar Fernandes de Almeida, Anderson dos Santos and I discuss how to make your Java tests output TAP (Test Anything Protocol) Streams. This test protocol has been used by Perl developers since Perl’s first version (1983~) but hasn’t been used by many Java developers yet, unfortunately. We hope it incentives other Java developers to use TAP for their tests. There is an alternative to TAP too, SubUnit, which was pointed out for me by Robert Collins in the Jenkins dev-list few weeks ago. Now I am preparing a comparison between TAP and SubUnit as an analysis before developing a plug-in for Jenkins to show detailed test results (such as exception, images, raw test, error line, etc).

Throughout the article we explain how to use tap4j to generate TAP Streams with TestNG, however it is possible to use the same approach to generate TAP Streams with JUnit.

Now I will translate the article to send it to Patrick LeBoutillier, who contributed to this article answering patiently my questions by mail and writing metatap, a utility that lets you check if a TAP Stream is valid, according to the program parameters. This utility is being used in tap4j for integration tests between Perl and Java.

Unfortunately I’m not allowed to redistribute the article, not even an English version of it :-(

Cheers :)