Upcoming MXUnit Events

ColdFusion Meetup - "ANT on the Wire: Using FTP, Email, SVN, and VSS"; Thursday, 02/28/08, 12:00 Noon EST; url: http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/calendar/7386772/
MXUnit Eclipse Plugin Developer, Marc Esher, will discuss using FTP, Email, Subversion, and VSS access in your ANT build files.

ColdFusion Meetup - "Unit Testing w/MXUnit - Jump Start"; Thursday, 03/06/08, 12:00 Noon EST; Bill and Marc will talk about getting started with MXUnit and unit testing. url: http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/calendar/7388545/

Webmaniacs Conference - Washington, D.C., May 19-23, 2008. Bill and Marc will be presenting two sessions: a one-hour lecture and a two hour hands on session. Of course, these deal with concepts of Test Driven Development, unit testing, and MXUnit.


We've included a couple of new features and bug fixes in MXUnit Release Candidate #1. Download the latest version of the framework here: http://mxunit.org/download.cfm
and update your MXUnit Eclipse plugin using the following url: http://mxunit.org/update

best,
bill

Q: Why write tests first?
A: Because if you write your executable code first, chances are you won't go back and write a test for it.

MXUnit - Release Candidate No.1 Now Available

MXUnit RC1

A long time in the making, los hombres at MXUnit.org are proud to announce the first release candidate of their Unit Test Framework and Eclipse Plugin for ColdFusion Developers.

Features include a simple-to-use extensible framework that allows developers to spend more time writing tests and code than getting distracted by frameworks details. The MXUnit Eclipse Plugin further facilitates test creation by integrating running and debugging of tests within the Eclipse IDE.

Key Features:

• Easy to see your data with cfoutput, cfdump, and debug()

• Easy to run single test functions

• Easy "directory runner" for running entire directories of tests

• Easy to test private functions in your components

• Ability to switch to message-first style assertions to help ease transition from other frameworks

• A plethora of output formats from which to choose

• Ant Integration

• A team actively improving the framework, making testing easier, and providing abundant documentation

So… if you've made a New Year's Resolution to start unit testing, now's a perfect time to give MXUnit a test drive. For those of you using an existing framework but have a few minutes to burn checking this one out, we'd love to hear your feedback, too.

Visit http://mxunit.org/ for downloads and details.

MXUnit will be giving both a one hour presentation and two-hour hands on workshop at Webmaniacs in Washington, D.C., in May. Also, keep an eye out at ColdFusion Meetup where MXUnit major dude, Marc Esher, will be doing a very informative presentation entitled Ant on the Wire on Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 12:00 PM EST . Then we'll follow that up with a two-part series at ColdFusion Meetup on unit testing with MXUnit.

Licensed under the GNU 3.0 Copyleft License

MXUnit Eclipse Plugin Updates

I just added a new release of the MXUnit plugin for Eclipse to the update site. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, and you're interested in unit testing for CF, give MXUnit a shot (http://mxunit.org).

For those of you who do know what I'm talking about, the changes are:

• Biggest change: the plugin now supports authentication. Basic authentication has been tested. NTLM should work, although your mileage may vary. You set the username and password in the MXUnit project properties, not the MXUnit preferences
• Preference and property pages now have links directly to the appropriate help resource
• Eclipse help updated to include instructions for authentication
• When loading test methods into the test tree, the performance is now much better. It no longer blocks until all methods are loaded but instead loads asynchronously. The user experience difference is quite dramatic

Thanks to a user named Goyiux for prompting the authentication stuff. Thanks to all the dudes on the eclipse newsgroups for answering my pestering questions about dumb layout stuff. Thanks to Weyerbacher for brewing really good 10% beers for numbing the NTLM/Axis pain.

New Ant Tutorial at MXUnit.org

Have you ever wondered how you could generate those really cool JUnit reports in ColdFusion? With MXUnit's Ant Task, this is a pretty simple thing to accomplish and the below cut-and-paste tutorial will show you how in a few short minutes.

http://mxunit.org/doc/index.cfm?doc=antjunit

Enjoy!

MXUnit Eclipse Snippets

For you snippet fans, I've added a handful of snippets to Todd Sharp's Cfsnippets.org snipex server. Full instructions for using the snippets are here.

p.s. if you're using eclipse and not using snippets, do yourself a favor and learn about them (all links you need are in the link above). They're a huge time saver

Automating Your Unit Tests: Start-to-finish example

Getting started with unit testing is hard for a lot of people. If you could count the number of people on January 2nd who say "This year I'm going to start unit testing", and then compare that with the number of people on March 1 who actually followed through, you'd get a graph that looked like... well, it'd look like the graph of the people who promised to start exercising, too.

Hard stuff, or stuff that's perceived to be hard, requires lots of different motivators to turn the behavior into a habit. One potentially overlooked motivator to keep you unit testing is test automation. Why? Because it acts as a type of feedback loop. You're reminded every day (or several times a day) of the work you've put in. There's comfort in seeing the Success-to-Fail ratio improve over time. When you get an email from your test automation code that says "Successes: 5" on Monday and then the next Monday you see "Successes: 10"... that's progress. You've written tests. You're getting the green bar. It's basic slot machine psychology.

So how do you automate?

Simple: you spend 10 hours installing a continuous integration server, write a few hundred lines of ANT script, and bam, you're done.

So, get to it!

.........

What? Oh. You don't need that yet. You only have a few dozen tests and your boss is already up your a$$ telling you to quit testing and start programming (tee hee). OK, well, i guess you could just do it the easier way then. It's boring. It's plain-jane. And it certainly won't get you chicks. But it will get you automated tests and notifications and all that stuff.

Without further adieu, here it is: simple test automation using good old CFAdmin scheduled task and some pretty simple code (that you can copy and paste). It'll take you longer to read this documentation than it will to have your tests automated.

Good luck!

--marc