Quick and easy way to test OSGi bundles - java

Currently, I am working on a new version control system as part of a final year project at University. The idea is to make it highly adaptable and pluggable.
We're using the OSGi framework (Equinox implementation) to manage our plug ins. My problem is that I can't find a simple & easy to use method for testing OSGi bundles.
Currently, I have to build the bundle using Maven and then execute a test harness. I'm looking for something like the JUnit test runner for Eclipse, as it will save me a bunch of time.
Is there a quick and easy way to test OSGi bundles?
EDIT: I don't need something to test Eclipse plug ins or GUI components, just OSGi bundles.
EDIT2: Is there some framework that supports JUnit4?

More recently, you should have a look at Pax Exam:
http://team.ops4j.org/wiki/display/paxexam/Pax+Exam
This is the current effort at OPS4J related to testing.

Here are some tools not mentioned yet:
I'm using Tycho, which is a tool for using Maven to build Eclipse plugins. If you create tests inside their own plug-ins, or plug-in fragments, Tycho can run each set of tests inside its own OSGi instance, with all its required dependencies. Intro and further info. This is working quite well for me.
jUnit4OSGI looks straightforward. You make subclasses of OSGiTestCase, and you get methods like getServiceReference(), etc.
Pluginbuilder, a headless build system for OSGi bundles / Eclipse plug-ins, has a test-running framework called Autotestsuite. It runs the tests in the context of the OSGi environment, after the build step. But, it doesn't seem to have been maintained for several years. I think that many Eclipse projects are migrating from Pluginbuilder to Tycho.
Another option is to start an instance of an OSGi container within your unit test, which you run directly, as explained here.
Here's someone who's written a small bundle test collector, which searches for JUnit (3) tests and runs them.

Spring Dynamic Modules has excellent support for testing OSGi bundles.

There is a dedicated open source OSGi testing framework on OPS4J (ops4j.org) called Pax Drone.
You might want to have a look at Pax Drone ([http://wiki.ops4j.org/confluence/x/KABo]) which enables you to use all Felix Versions as well as Equinox and Knopflerfish in your tests.
Cheers,
Toni

Eclipse has a launch configuration type for running JUnit tests in the context of an Eclipse (i.e. OSGi) application:
http://help.eclipse.org/stable/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.pde.doc.user/guide/tools/launchers/junit_launcher.htm

If you need to test GUI components I've found SWTBot gets the job done.

Treaty is a contract(testing) framework that is pretty academic but has some nice ideas. There are papers that are published on it, and the people currently working on improving it.

The ProSyst Test Execution Environment is a useful test tool for OSGi bundles. It also supports JUnit tests as one of the possible test models.

For unit tests use the EasyMock framework or create your own implementations of the required interfaces for testing .

I think we met the same issue and we made our own solution. There are different parts of the solution:
A junit4runner that catches all OSGi services that has a special property defined. It runs these caught services with JUnit4 engine. JUnit annotations should be placed into interfaces that the services implement.
A maven plugin that starts an OSGi framework (a custom framework can be created as maven dependency) and runs the unit tests inside the integration-test maven lifecycle.
A deployer OSGi bundle. If this is dropped into your OSGi container a simple always-on-top window will be opened where you can drop your project folders (from total commander or from eclipse). This will then redeploy that bundle.
With the tools you can do TDD and have the written tests always run inside the maven integration-phase as well. It is recommended to use eclipse with m2e and maven-bundle-plugin as in this case the target/classes/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF is regenerated as soon as you save a class in your source so you can drag the project and drop to the deployer window. The OSGi bundles you develop do not have to have any special feature (like being an eclipse plugin or something).
The whole solution is OpenSource. You can find a tutorial at http://cookbook.everit.org

During the last couple of years Tycho - a new Maven based build system for OSGi - has become rather popular among the Eclipse Foundation. This framework also includes method to use Maven Surefire to test OSGi bundles in separate testbeds...

There are many ways to test OSGi components, I suppose. One way of doing the testing is to use Robot Framework. What I've done is made my tests with Robot Framework and have the remote libraries either installed in OSGi or have them talk to OSGi-test components through sockets and robot would talk to these modules and run tests through them.
So, basically your OSGi-modules should have interfaces that do something and produce some output. So, in my setup I had a test components that would make service calls to the actual OSGi-component and then there would be a listening-service that would catch the events/service calls (made by the module under test) and those results could be asked by the robot. So basically this way you can split a massive system in small components and have the system run in production/production like enviroment and have it tested automatically on component level or have some of the real components be tested in unison.

Along with others mentioned mockito is very handy to mock plugin dependencies(references etc). see https://www.baeldung.com/mockito-annotations

How about bnd-testing-maven-plugin?
It allow running JUnit inside a running container like Felix or Equinox.
If you used the BNDTools for eclipse this is very similar but just maven withpout eclipse and without a UI.
https://github.com/bndtools/bnd/tree/master/maven/bnd-testing-maven-plugin
also look at the effectiveosgi archetype for maven. This will give you a good starting point to build your project or just add tests.
https://github.com/effectiveosgi

Related

How to separate class loader for different jar version?

I have a test war file that contains many tests. Each test is packaged in maven project with a lot of dependencies. We use maven for dependency management but it comes with a problem. When a test update a common library, it can break other test that depends on the older version of the lib. How to make all the test run in a completely separate environment with its own set of library version? I can't execute them in a separate jvm because these tests need to be executed very frequently like very 30 sec or so. Can OSGi help solve this problem?
Yes OSGi can solve this problem, but it is not a step to be taken lightly. Use OSGi when you are ready to commit time and effort to isolating and managing dependencies, versioning them properly and, optionally, making your code and architecture more modular/reusable.
Bear in mind that adopting OSGi can be painful at first due to non-modular practices used by some legacy libraries.

Tips on making PAX (OSGI testing) framework faster

I know PAX is doing a lot of stuff and that creating the container and copying all those jars is not cheap but are there any general tips to improve performance. I have tests that execute outside the container in a fraction of a second while inside they take much longer. I am using PAX primarily to verify that my manifests are accurate and the bundle would be deployable without any missing dependencies. I have tried Knopflerfish, Equinox, Felix and in general there is little difference they are relatively slow to a barebones containerless run.
As you realised, the underlying container does not make much of a difference.
If you want to have minimal bundles created on the fly, you can try out Pax Tinybundles: if this applies to your case, you can build a set of minimized bundles with only the content you actually need for testing. For example, you can just package your Manifest. I haven't benchmarked it myself for this particular purpose, but it is worth a shot.
As a sidenote, please consider that Pax Exam 2.3 introduced support (see here) for #Before and #After, thus coming to your rescue for more flexible load setup/teardown.
Using Native Container is faster than Pax Runner Container, saving the overhead of starting an external process.
Using EagerSingleStagedReactorFactory saves the overhead of restarting the framework for each test.
To avoid copying JARs, prefer mvn: URLs or mavenBundle() to general URLs, then bundles will be taken from your local Maven repository, once they have been downloaded.
A new feature in Pax Exam 2.3.0 is the reference: protocol which allows you to provision bundles in place, without copying - this works even for exploded bundles (i.e. an unzipped directory structure).

Create web application framework with Maven

we are trying to develop a web application framework and build implementatins on top of it. This framwork will be versioned in SVN, live its own life in parallel to those implementations. It will have lots of spring config files, security config and so on. We would like to use those in those implementations.
What structure should such an project have? Keep everything together? Link particular folers (implementations) in "svn: externals"? We would like to use Maven, and create an archetype for those implementations, but is it possible to update the archetype after it has been changed in implementation applications?
Regards,
This is a good example :
http://www.sonatype.com/books/mvnex-book/reference/web.html
Also this book is very useful resource when starting with maven
I found this also :
http://www.avajava.com/tutorials/lessons/how-do-i-create-a-web-application-project-using-maven.html
I'd suggest you create your framework project as a simple jar project to include in your implementation, which would be war projects. For the Spring config files you have three options then:
Package them into your framework jar. This would make it hard for the implementations to customize it. I would not recommend it, unless your configuration is definitively fixed.
Use svn: externals. I have not much experience with that, but I think dependencies between svn repositories would be hard to manage.
Maintain these configuration files per implementation. So, an archetype would help to get started with an initial configuration. Then maintain these configuration files as your framework evolves. This is what we do most of the time. The good thing about Spring configuration is that it often rarely needs to be touched once you are confident with it.

How to develop a Nightly Builder

I was told to create a tool like a Nightly Builder for a JUnit project. It's a client-server project with oracle database.The tests are based on QTP. Also there is a test interface written on C#. The tester can click on the interface to choose which tests to run and get a report from each test. So I have to make this procedure automated. So what tools should I use?
Thanks in advance
Best regards
Have you considered using CruiseControl or like tool? We use this at my work and it was easy to get up and running with Junit and/or TestNG. Other tools to consider are buildbot, continuum, hudson, etc. (Go to google and type "cruisecontrol vs" and see a bunch of other auto builder tools.) Then see how they handle nightly builds.... here's a reference for CruiseControl.
You should use Quartz. In the quart scheduling xml file you can specify it to build your project. In your project you should have junit test cases execute whenever a build happens. This way you can achieve a daily build process. If your project already utilizes Spring framework then you can use the spring job scheduler helper library too (it's a wrapper around quartz).
Ideally you should use hudson to manage the daily builds but I am not sure if your organization utilizes it or not.
Hope this helps.

Dynamic loading of modules in Java

In Java, I can dynamically add stuff to classpath and load classes ("dynamically" meaning without restarting my application). Is there a known framework/library which deals with dynamic loading/unloading of modules without restart?
The usual setup, especially for web-apps, is load balancer, several instances of application, and gradual deployment and restart of new version. I'm looking for something else - application with several services/plugins, possibly single-instance desktop application, where disabling single service is cheap, but bringing down or restarting complete application is not feasible.
I'm thinking about typical plugin infrastructure, where plugins can be upgraded or installed without restarting application. Do I have to program that from scratch, or is something already available? Spring-compatible and opensource is a plus, but not a requirement.
You might consider running your spring application in an OSGI framework.
I believe the DMServer is a module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications, based on OSGI
You can find more details in this Hello, OSGi, Part 2: Introduction to Spring Dynamic Modules article, in particular how to use Spring DM to dynamically install, update, and uninstall modules in a running system.
Note: when you speak about "plugins can be upgraded or installed without restarting application", OSGI is the first candidate framework that comes to mind.
It is all about modularization of applications into smaller bundles.
Each bundle is a tightly-coupled, dynamically loadable collection of classes, jars, and configuration files that explicitly declare their external dependencies (if any).
Perhaps the simplest approach is to load each plugin with it's own class loader. Then discard the class loader and create a new one to reload the plugin. You will want init() and destroy() methods in the plugin API to allow a chance for startup/shutdown type functionality.
This also has the advantage of isolating the plugins from each other.
A URLClassLoader is your starting point for this. The general idea is that you provide a XxxPlugin superclass that any plugin subclasses. Consider the example of Applet, which is essentially a GUI plugin (or Midlet, etc).

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