Status File for Jakarta Commons "Latka" ApplicationMorgan DelagrangeDoug SaleRodney WaldhoffdIon Gillard Commons Documentation Team

Testing websites is a pain. Many regression tests for a website can be verified automatically, speeding up the quality assurance process and allowing the engineers to focus on the more important issues. Additionally developers may want to monitor their development, QA and production environment, so that they can be sure that everything is running as they expect.

Latka is an HTTP functional testing suite for automated QA, acceptance and regression testing. Latka suites are XML documents, which can be written and/or modified without writing Java code. Latka tests can be created quickly and modified easily, even by engineers without Java experience.

Latka relies on:

Current Release: 1.0 alpha 1

Planned Next Release: 1.0, timeframe: 12 April, 2002

The following individuals are the primary developers and maintainers of this component. Developers who plan to use Latka in their own projects are encouraged to collaborate on the future development of this component to ensure that it continues to meet a variety of needs.

Latka development status:

  • Add a universal mechanism for negating validators. Currently regexp and xpath validators implement negation internally as a special cond attribute. This adds somewhat to the internal complexity. It would be better to have the framework handle negation by being able to wrap tests in a <not/> element.

  • Make the inclusion of individual validators optional at build time.

  • Set up Latka to use the proxy support of later HttpClient builds

  • Write unit tests for each validator, with a mock object implementing the Response interface

  • Fix the webpages build so that it builds into the build/docs directory and then copies to commons

  • Create better documentation, especially the User's Guide and Developer's Guide

  • Ensure coding standards are consistent across the project's codebase, preferably using a tool such as CheckStyle

  • Add XMLValidate tasks to the build file so that any XML doc with a DTD is checked before used