[TIP] Which mock object framework should I use?

[Aaron Maxwell]

I have really only used pymock, so I can't compare it to the others listed.  
For what it is worth, however, it's a pretty good mocking library, at least 
as good as ones I have used in other languages.  The record/replay/expect 
interface is pretty fine grained.  The functionality is fairly complete: you 
can even mock-override standard library functions (like, say, os.listdir).

One feature I really like: you can define and pass an arbitrary function to 
expectAndReturn.  This is useful when you a need a mock method to behave in a 
more complex way than can be specified using the default command interface.  
(It's a feature I have missed in other language libraries.  Since python sees 
functions as first-class objects, it's not as hard to implement as a feature 
in a python mocking library, so maybe the others in the list have it as 
well.)

The docs for it could be better.  They're not bad, just... could be better.

I'd be interested to hear people's experiences with the others as well.

-Aaron

On Saturday 17 November 2007 11:06:30 Martin Aspeli wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to use a mock objects library to mock out services. So far,
> I've seen:
>
>   - pymock
>   - python-mock
>   - pMock
>   - minimock
>   - Mocky
>
> Some of these (the last two) are doctest-only propositions as far as I
> can see, in that they basically print stuff that you then verify. I can
> see how that's useful, but I'd also like something more explicit, where
> I can make declarations about which methods I expect to be called, in
> which order, with particular arguments and returning particular values.
>
>  From a brief glance, pymock looks nice in that it's based on EasyMock,
> which I've used in Java. I could imagine using a combination of this and
> minimock in doctests.
>
> Has anyone done a more thorough evaluation and come up with any
> recommendations?
>
> Thanks,
> Martin



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Aaron Maxwell
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