It's been forever again since I last posted. My last post was on FitNesse and my thoughts on the licensing scheme it uses. Well, Uncle Bob was already thinking about this and is hard at work making it possible to release under a more permissive license.
Part of how he is doing that is a move to a new table runner (interpreter) called Slim. I have to say, that for me and my work, Slim is the new Fit. My first forays into writing fixtures for FitNesse were less than perfect. Due to my weak Java skills and the pressures to get a solution in place, I came up with a solution that relied on inheritance and code generation. Neither of which are that bad a thing, but combined with a number of other factors, have proven to be less than my ideal.
Slim has already started to change that. Slim is much easier to write fixtures for. Slim eliminates inheritance on a very tricky parse tree concept and replaces it with lists of lists of strings. This has it's limitations (its a little stricter about data and it involves building the lists to return to the FitNesse server and the Slim table), but those limitations are worth it. One could argue that they aren't actually limitations, but good practices or more consistent approaches.
I was able to create a list fixture for listing sql select statements in about 125 lines of code and replace hundreds of code-generated classes in my old system, because it was so much easier to build a list of lists to return than to bend RowFixture to my will. I was able to replace hundreds of code generated RowEntry fixtures with a single class that is used in scenario tables and scripts. Eventually, I will be able to convert the 200+ tests I have to use the new table styles and shrink to a handful of actual classes that I, or someone on my team, had to write.
As for the classes that we will need beyond the one driver and the one list fixture, they will only be necessary for special cases where we need to condense table-like data into XML and where it would be a lot less elegant to build it using the scenario tables.
It's late and I'm getting tired, but I will be posting more about FitNesse. I doubt I can out-do the wonderful tutorial available here: http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/FitNesse.Tutorials. Brett is doing some great stuff there. I will try to contribute what I can to the community. So it might be some thoughts and pointers. Eventually it will be the vim syntax coloring file that I've been working on.
Before I go, I want to re-iterate my gratitude to Uncle Bob and all of the other great people who are contributing to the current Renaissance in the FitNesse community. There is great stuff afoot here and I'm glad to be in a situation where I can experience it and contribute in my own little ways.
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2 comments:
Dan,
Even though Bob's done all the work, I'm glad you like Slim. I do as well. Not to downplay Fit, it was originally designed as a complete solution, and it works well. It also has several excellent extensions.
However, I prefer the, well, slimness of Slim.
Regarding your comments on producing query results (list of list of list of string), I can help with that. You mentioned my tutorials, thanks! There's one in particular to look here. I wrote something to help improve creating query results.
You can download the source from: here and there are embedded tests that serve as examples. The tutorial also walks you through using in. However, here's a quick example: here
Maybe I shouldn't give in to a powerful urge to post when I'm tired.
I don't actually mind the lists. Leveraging the helper method that is provided with Slim, I was able to make my query tables work pretty easily. It's actually more of a pain when working with TableTable for the first time. But I've been successful at those now as well.
Your tutorials are really great. They are a reference I will use and that I will refer others to.
I think I'm fortunate compared to many people in that the architecture for my app is very conducive to this tool.
As for Fit, it will always be special because it helped parent FitNesse. Slim is a lot easier to code. I think that with a little time, feature parity with some of the supplemental tools will become available and more and more people will convert.
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