Hi John,

I think you're the first one to ask how to use Cactus to unit test Portlets!

It should be relatively easy (but a big and long task) to implement support
for Portlets inside Cactus and I'm all for integrating it into the project
should you or someone provide a patch for it. Actually if someone is really
keen to work on this and support it on the long term, I'd even prefer to
make that person a committer on the project (after he's proved himself of
course ;-)) as that person will be the best placed to fix bugs, improve the
code, etc.

As a quickstart, here are the Java classes that would need to be implemented
in the Cactus framework subproject:

* Create a PortletTestCase class (similar to the ServletTestCase one)
* Create a PortletConfiguration interface + DefaultPortletConfiguration
implementation class (again similar to the Servlet one)
* Create PortletImplicitObjects, PortletTestCaller and PortletTestController
classes
* Create wrappers around Portlet implicit objects *if* need be only

That's the easy part but would be enough for users to start benefiting from
it. They would need to manunally start their portlet container and manually
deploy their Cactus tests into it though.

The next step is to add support for Portlets inside the Cactus integrations
subprojects, namely: the Ant integration subproject, the Maven integration
subproject, create a Portlet Test Runner (similar to the Servlet Test
Runner), etc.

But again, this can be implemented bit by bit over time.

If you're interested in implementing this for Cactus, you would also need to
follow the Cactus development guidelines
(http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/participating/coding_conventions.html,
http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/participating/apis.html).

The only request I'm asking is that if you wish to start this initiative,
that you do it seriously and consistently over time. There's nothing as
detrimental for an open source project as someone who start working on
something and then stops midway (It happened to us with the Eclipse plugin
for Cactus - The guy started and then left the project with something
halfway working).

Let me know what you think and fire any specific questions you have!

Thanks
-Vincent

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Rousseau [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: vendredi 6 ao�t 2004 23:27
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Portlet support
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm new to cactus, but not to the concept. I wrote my own testbed (cactus-
> lite?) to exercise our servlet and JSP container using HttpUnit and some
> other tools early last year.
> 
> I'm currently working on our portlet container and I'd like to use cactus
> to exercise the implementation instead of rolling my own. We also have
> portlet writers here that would make use of this. Can somebody give me a
> quick laundry list of what I would need to implement / change to support
> testing portlets? Some of the classes needed are obvious, but any pointers
> to get me going would be very much appreciated.
> 
> I've searched the dev archives and didn't find any references to portlet.
> Has anyone done any work to support testing portlets with cactus before?
> 
> I'd, of course, be willing to contribute the changes back once I'm done.
> 
> Thanks
> -John
> 
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> John Rousseau                               [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Novell, Inc.                              Phone: +1 781 464 8377
> 404 Wyman Street                            Fax: +1 781 464 8100
> Waltham, MA 02451                          http://www.novell.com
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