Tools to test SCA applications

[Vincent Zurczak - EBM WebSourcing <vi...@ebmwebsourcing.com>]

Hello.

I am a contributor to the SCA tooling within the Eclipse STP project 
[0], and I'm trying to evaluate the testing tools for SCA.

The STP project already provides a graphical designer to build 
composites, and SCA annotations for Java implementations. It will also 
soon propose editors (an XML editor and a form editor). For the 
deployment, this project already supports Tuscany platforms [1] and it 
is expected to support the platforms developed within the SCOrWare 
project [2] before fall.

In fact, most of the aspects of the development of SCA applications will 
be covered by this tooling. The only unknown, IMO, is test.
I know Tuscany provides some help with JUnit tests. In a more general 
view, I'd like to have your opinion about testing SCA applications. 
Which tools do you use and to test what, which tools you would need... 
Personally, I'm not really sure there is a need of new tools in fact... 
This is why I'm asking.

Implementations can be tested as any other code. You can perform unit 
tests, integration tests and so on.
Services used in a composite (e.g. through references) are harder to 
test. If they are web services, a lot of tools exist, like SOAPui or the 
Eclipse WTP project. If they are "services" you access with other 
protocols like RMI or JMS, test is much more harder but it is still 
feasible. But is it useful ?
So, I wonder what we really want to test with SCA applications.

I have thought to a tool proposing a form to call any SCA service (no 
matter its binding). It would allow you to test a service manually or to 
define more complex test scenarios for automated testing. But for which 
users ? For a developer, testing a composite service is the same thing 
than testing the component implementation promoted by this service. 
Automated scenarios execution could be used for performance measurement 
and load testing.  But in this case, the user is not a developer anymore.

I have also seen this message [1], but it is two years old. Maybe things 
have changed.

So, what do you think about test for SCA applications ? I would be 
really curious to know what you think about this.

Regards,

                   Vincent Zurczak.



[0] http://www.eclipse.org/stp/sca/index.php
[1] http://incubator.apache.org/tuscany/
[2] http://www.scorware.org/
[3] http://www.mail-archive.com/tuscany-dev@ws.apache.org/msg05814.html

-- 
Vincent Zurczak
EBM WebSourcing
+ 33 (0) 4 38 12 16 77