It's high time to introduce some consistency :)

[bartoszmajsak]

Hi guys,

I've been looking at the tests we have so far and I spotted few things which I believe we should address any time soon to avoid confusion in the future.

• We have at least 3 different ways for naming test methods [1] [2] [3]. I personally favor option 3, as test methods tend to be lengthy soReadingThemInTheCamelCaseFormCanBeQuiteTrickyFromTimeToTime. It's also easier to spot them on the stack trace.
• As per @aslakknutsen suggestion small README about each and every sample and the goals for tests would be beneficial not only to understand what one (or they...) can find there but also what can be implemented if missing (some hints about missing test cases etc.)
• The testing framework: even though JUnit is defacto a standard why couldn't we use Spock? It's not only cleaner, more structured and descriptive way of expressing the tests, but will be also a dog fooding exercise as Arquillian has an extension for that (yeah yeah I do have hidden agenda here). Also when it comes to assertions I would stronly opt for assertj as it's simply way more feature rich and growing very rapidly. On top of that it's easier to write such assertions in the IDE, as it is fluent interface (so we can rely on code completion) rather than onioning in the Hamcrest style.

That said, I would be happy to help in converting/unifying our code base. Let's just agree on sth instead of putting more freestyle code here and there.

[aslakknutsen]

@bartoszmajsak Would you be interested in converting one of the existing tests to use Spock so show the difference?

[bartoszmajsak]

@aslakknutsen I can contribute new tests written in Spock (eg. JPA stuff). Does it sound good enough?

[aslakknutsen]

@bartoszmajsak sure, that'll work too

[arun-gupta]

Works for me too. This could be a starting point.

[hasalex]

+1 for AssertJ.
Never tried Spock, but would be an opportunity to learn.

[kubamarchwicki]

+1 for spock.
Though for people not very familiar with the complete stack (JEE umbrella + concrete spec + Arquillian) there is an entry barrier. That's one of my thoughts after a hack the spec night where I together with a bunch of programmers (gender omitted ;)) tried to add some value with more tests
Even thought people were using parts of the spec on daily basis (servlets, jpa) - getting on track with the project and getting head around Arquillian took us some time. I'd be afraid that adding Spock to this configuration might make cracking the tests even harder.

This is great learning opportunity with Spock but if we are looking for a wider adoption and participation it might get things more messy. Additionally if this is a learning exercise for other I think we should leave this as simple as possible, putting JEE sample + tests as understandable for an average programmer as possible.

[bartoszmajsak]

Personally I don't see as a big challenge to grasp Spock. Especially if you know just a bit of unit testing. And at the end of the day the more you learn the better. But I leave it open.

[stenaksel]

I really like the "hidden agenda" :-)

[radcortez]

Just do a couple of tests using Spock and then people can decide.

Regarding naming conventions for the test methods, option 3 doesn't feel java to me, but if everyone wants to change it, let's go for it.

I do have some additional points about consistency:

• Should we start using some common checkstyle rules?
• The new files being created don't have the copyright notice (mines included :) ). Should we enforce it?

[bartoszmajsak]

Sure, I will throw in some stuff very soon.

With regards to "does not feel java"... I had the same feeling initially, but c'mon, thisIsJustAConventionToImproveReadabilityOfLongAndOverTalkativeMethodNames :) ofCourseIfWeUseSpockThisWontBeAProblemAnymoreBecauseYouWillNameItDifferently. Now that was java ;)

Checkstyle +1
About the copyright - yeah... noticed that as well. I think we can consider to throw it in. Can be automated too.

[arun-gupta]

No copyright is needed on new files. The top-level LICENSE file says:

"Except where otherwise indicated, everything in this repository is licensed under the MIT license"

so we are ok.

Checkstyle +1

Do you want to start adding some of these guidelines at http://javaee-samples.github.io/ ?

[bartoszmajsak]

Ok, so we might need to review the license headers if they are still relevant in the source files.
I can do some bits of guidelines both on the website and on the README displayed when you land in the repo. Ideally only readme here which can be later on simply imported when generating the website.

[arun-gupta]

yep, sounds reasonable. You and Aslak can drive the website content ?

[bartoszmajsak]

I can only speak for myself ;) I'm in.

[arun-gupta]

Aslak created it, now you can drive it :-)