Monday, November 05, 2007

dbFit is good stuff!

I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to try out dbFit, a FitNesse fixture after reading about it on InfoQ. We were unit testing our stored procedures in our database, and dbFit was a great "fit". It took me a while to get going because I hadn't worked with FitNesse before, so in essence I was learning two technologies at once. Once I figured it out, though, it was a real pleasure to work with, and Gojko was very helpful in fixing a bug and adding an Update command that I had suggested.

A few helpful practices I figured out along the way:
- Declare your classpath in your test suite page
- Have your database connection declared in your SetUp page for your suite
- Have links to your tests from your suite page so you can get to them without having to run your test suite

We're going to have John Tyler talk more about FitNesse at the next HJUG meeting on January 30th, and I'm definitely looking forward to it. Gojko's work makes me wonder if I could try and write a JPA / EJB3 FitNesse fixture... It would be quite an undertaking, but I think it could be very useful.