[MacRuby-devel] testing macruby/hotcocoa apps

[Barry Wark]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Jeremy Voorhis <jvoorhis at gmail.com> wrote:
> I second the idea also. Tools like Squish have their place, but as a
> solo/hobbyist developer, I'd much rather put some faith in Apple's
> efforts to test that scrollbars scroll properly, buttons dispatch to
> actions, etc. and focus on how *my* code constructs views, binds data
> and generally assert that the state of my views is what I expect.
>
> On a related note, I just created my first custom view in macruby
> (just a throw-away tutorial app) and wondered what the best strategy
> for testing Cocoa graphics code might be. The most obvious answer
> would be to mock the critical parts of the API I am calling, but in
> practice I find that approach often leads to building a second
> implementation which isn't guaranteed to be any more correct than the
> code I am testing, and can become as much a liability as it is an
> asset. Does anyone know of a good model for testing graphics code that
> can actually account for how views *appear*?

Take a look at the Google Toolbox for Mac (on code.google.com). They
have an extension to the SenTesting framework (the standard unit
testing framework for ObjC) that handles this exact case. Categories
for NSView, CALayer, and UIView are already written, but any object
that can render into a CGGraphicsContext can participate. The code
compares the rendered output to a saved TIFF file (image files are
saved automatically by the framework) stored in the unit testing
bundle's Resources/ folder. We're using the GTM testing code a lot in
Core Plot (also code.google.com), an open source plotting framework
for OS X.

>
> Best,
>
> Jeremy Voorhis
>
> On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Alex Vollmer <alex.vollmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On May 11, 2009, at May 11, 11:18 PM, Matt Aimonetti wrote:
>>
>> Before I get too excited, I'd like to hear what you guys think and what you
>> believe you need to write better code?
>>
>> I love the concept, but have often found UI testing tools to be lacking. I
>> think that's because in the past I was always hoping to write *unit*-tests
>> for UIs which near-impossible to do without simply re-asserting the
>> implementation (which makes for a terrible unit-test). Having seen the
>> approach taken by Cucumber I'm more hopeful that this would get some
>> traction. Hell, even to have something that would step through all the
>> little manual scenarios automatically would be a great tool to have.
>> So, yeah, Matt. I'm all for it!
>> —Alex
>> ----
>> http://alexvollmer.com
>> http://moochbot.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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