Announcing the commons.testing and commons.mocking APIs

For many years years JUnit was the only framework that Java programmers could use for writing tests. However, Java now has a plethora of test frameworks to choose from, JUnit 3, JUnit 4 and TestNG being the three most popular. Likewise for mock objects developers can choose between jMock 1, jMock 2 or EasyMock.

This variety is a problem if you need to run tests that have been written for different frameworks or write tests that need to be run in different frameworks.

To solve this we will soon release two new projects, commons.testing and commons.mocking, which will provide a common, framework-agnostic API for writing tests and using mock objects. Developers will be able to write to a single API and then select a test framework and mock object library to execute the tests at runtime by annotating their tests with the commons.testing annotations, writing a few dozen lines of XML configuration, setting system property and calling the CommonsTestingDOMConfigurator in each test fixture set-up. The commons.testing and commons.mocking frameworks will run be able to run the tests with JUnit 3, JUnit 4 or TestNG and, if you use mock objects, jMock 1, jMock 2 or EasyMock, with no change to the test code at all! The APIs are extensible: by writing to the commons.testing SPI you can add support for more testing or mocking frameworks.

Furthermore, commons.testing can run tests that are defined entirely by XML configuration files instead of complex Java code. This will enable IT departments to greatly reduce the cost of pair programming and test driven development by having lower-cost, non-technical staff author the test cases that specify what the developers must implement in Java.

Watch this space for further annnouncements...

Update: Looks like similar things are happening in the .Net world. See this announcement of an Enterprise Mocking Block.

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To the person who posted a comment, we have to admit that this was an April Fools proposal