Testing XMLRPC::Servers

[Alex Young]

Hi all,

Has anybody looked at cloning XMLRPC::Server instances to run tests
suites against? My problem at the moment is that I've got a batch of
tests that each need to run against a fresh XMLRPC::Server instance.
Starting up one instance takes approximately 1.5 seconds on my computer,
which makes running a 100+ test suite rather boring. Cloning the
instance before running a test has no measurable impact on the time
taken, so I was thinking of making a clone for each test from a single
parent instance. However, that doesn't work because each clone after
the first is disconnected from the network interface, and I'm not
entirely sure how to proceed.

Now, what I'm actually trying to test isn't the network stack but rather
the XMLRPC interface, so if anybody's got any bright ideas as to how I
could do that without involving the server's startup and shutdown
sequence, I'm all ears...

 

[Brian Candler]

Has anybody looked at cloning XMLRPC::Server instances to run tests
suites against? My problem at the moment is that I've got a batch of
tests that each need to run against a fresh XMLRPC::Server instance.
Starting up one instance takes approximately 1.5 seconds on my computer,
which makes running a 100+ test suite rather boring. Cloning the
instance before running a test has no measurable impact on the time
taken, so I was thinking of making a clone for each test from a single
parent instance. However, that doesn't work because each clone after
the first is disconnected from the network interface, and I'm not
entirely sure how to proceed.

Now, what I'm actually trying to test isn't the network stack but rather
the XMLRPC interface, so if anybody's got any bright ideas as to how I
could do that without involving the server's startup and shutdown
sequence, I'm all ears...

Why do you need a fresh XMLRPC server instance each time? Why not create one
at the start, and run all the tests against it?

You can always just reinitialise the object which is being served via
XMLRPC. At worst, if XMLRPC doesn't let you change what object is being
served, then you give it a proxy object which delegates to the real handler,
and then before each test change the proxy object to point to a new handler
instance.

Regards,

Brian.

 

[Alex Young]

Why do you need a fresh XMLRPC server instance each time? Why not create one
at the start, and run all the tests against it?

So that the tests are as isolated as possible. I'll run into problems
of one test stepping on another one if I do this.

You can always just reinitialise the object which is being served via
XMLRPC. At worst, if XMLRPC doesn't let you change what object is being
served, then you give it a proxy object which delegates to the real handler,
and then before each test change the proxy object to point to a new handler
instance.

It's the interface I want to test, not just the object behind it. I'm
already testing the real handler separately. To give a trivial example,
what that doesn't catch is that any method ever returning nil will make
the XMLRPC serialiser barf. I'd much rather have that bubble up as an
exception than explicitly check for it every time.

Just to be clear, I'm using the add_handler(name, &block) form rather
than add_handler(prefix, handler_object) - in this case it lets me wrap
logging and exception trapping code around the main method call, but I
like the fact that I'm not exposing all of Object's methods to the
outside world too.