[TIP] Sclara is a Python testing DSL

[Alfredo Deza]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 3:56 AM, <Chris.Wesseling at cwi.nl> wrote:

> On 2012-03-24T16:00:06-0500, John MacKenzie wrote:
> > http://github.com/198d/sclara
> [...]
> > There are failures in both as a demonstration of how this interacts with
> a
> > TestRunner. The first one proves mainly that this is just Python; if you
> > use one of the provided runners you can execute your test files with the
> > Python interpreter (a big goal after looking at a tool like komira for
> this
> > sort of thing). The latter demonstrates that a nose plugin is possible
> and
> > probably implies that a py.test plugin is doable to.
>
> Could you point me to "komira"? Your e-mail turns up as the only
> relevant hit using my search-fu.
>

Konira is a Testing DSL framework [0] that I started working on about a
year and a half ago. It
is not valid Python (hence the DSL connotation) but it is translated to it
when tests are run
via de included Test Runner or with the py.test [1] plugin for it.

The problem that I see these solutions (including Konira) bring to the
table is that they all try to
create a flexible, descriptive and terse domain for writing tests, and
while some of them have a
significant gain over current testing standards, they fail when the
complexity goes beyond
asserting something that has a nice description.

It might be heretic to raise this in a testing list for Python, but I also
believe that the Python community
is not as pro-innovation in the testing environment as other communities
are, which is detrimental to the fact
that there are a few people who don't like the standard testing framework
and are looking forwards to an
alternative.




> > Beyond sclara, I'm considering the idea that, more than a testing
> > framework, I stumbled on an interesting pattern for building generic DSLs
> > in Python (more on this soon, hopefully).
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> I started reading the tests, to see if the DSL provides the clarity we
> need in
> this domain:
>
> examples/test_sclara.py line 14:
>
>    with test('does not have access to inner setup context') as context:
>        try:
>            context.bar
>        except AttributeError:
>            pass
>
>
> Will this fail if no AttributeError is thrown?
>
> And line 45:
>
>    with test('has access to inner setup context') as context:
>        assert context.foo == 'bar'
>
>    with test('has access to outer setup context') as context:
>        assert context.bar == 'foo'
>
> Shouldn't "inner" and "outer" be swapped here?
> The outer setup adds foo and baz attributes.
> The inner setup adds the bar attribute to the context and changes the baz
> value.
>
>
> What I see as a pitfall for users with this idiom, is that it might invite
> to
> breaking isolation.
>
> Interesting, though.
>
>
[0] http://konira.cafepais.com/docs/index.html
[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytest-konira


> --
> Chris Wesseling
> Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
> https://www.cwi.nl/people/ccw
>
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