Testing and Groovin'

I've come to the conclusion that writing unit tests in Java is such a pain. Specially when there are others languages that are better suited for writing test. Lately, I've been writing all my test using Groovy. I have been using it for writing unit tests and creating mock objects. I am using EasyMock for most of my programming time, but I recently found out that Groovy has its own mock object framework. Here are some example from the site. I think that they are pretty compelling.

Domain Layer:




Service Layer:







This is the class that we are going to test. As you noticed, we are using the ExchangeRateService class.


Tests:

Here we will need to mock the ExchangeRateService. We are going to use a few example that Groovy can provide us:
- You can often get away with simple maps or closures to build your custom mocks
- By using maps or expandos, we can incorporate desired behaviour of a collaborator very easily as shown here:



This is an example of using it with closure:



If we need the full power of a dynamic mocking framework, Groovy has a built-in framework which makes use of meta-programming to define the behaviour of the service. An example is shown here:

As I mentioned, just like any other mocking framework, Groovy has its own framework build-in: "MockFor" which defines the behavior of the collaborator.


Let me know how it goes and thanks for reading!