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Re: [xsl] XSLT Unit testing

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Sorry if my comment came across as negative, I'm genuinely interested
in how widespread its use is.

I'm a contractor and go to lots of interviews, and I'm often asked
about unit testing xslt....


On 17 August 2011 16:58, Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I agree with Tony.
>
> I've used XSpec successfully on projects Andrew might consider "medium
> sized", and expect to do so again.
>
> I don't use it on every project, but then for me, every project is its own
> creature, with its own peculiar care and feeding. Setup and maintenance
> relating directly to XSpec, while not trivial, will be a fairly modest part
> of this (or we won't use it). When it is a good fit, its big impact is on
> the quality and validability of the results. (It also saves time and
reduces
> certain kinds of stresses.)
>
> In my experience, whether it's a good fit depends on a number of intrinsic
> and extrinsic factors (size and complexity of the transformations; how
> "correctness" is specified and specs are managed; the nature of the target;
> the maintenance model), only a few of which might be addressed with
> technical solutions. As always, the hard problems are not the technical
> ones.
>
> Yet I can easily surmise there are other sorts of programming environments
> in which it's more often, or more generally, a good fit.
>
> Cheers,
> Wendell
>
> On 8/17/2011 7:32 AM, Tony Graham wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, August 17, 2011 10:25 am, Andrew Welch wrote:
>>>>
>>>> As a committer for both XSpec and Juxy [1], I'm glad when people adopt
>>>> XSpec
>>>
>>> So who has adopted xspec, is anyone on the list currently using it or
>>> know of its use on any big projects?  The download count is very
>>
>> How big is big?  I've used it (as you might expect) and on a fairly big
>> project, but thanks to the magic of NDA's I can't say what.
>>
>>> low...  (the 0.2 version number doesn't inspire confidence either :)
>>
>> Surely the question isn't whether it's popular with other people but
>> whether it works for you?
>>
>> Arguably, XSLT people haven't drunk the testing Kool-Aid to the extent
>> that, say, Java people have, and even fewer will have drunk the
>> test-driven development flavour.  XSLTers also have other techniques
>> available such as validating the output with a schema and/or Schematron or
>> using a schema-aware XSLT processor.  But the validating your output isn't
>> the same as ensuring it's the right output for a given input.
>>
>> And I think you can attribute the low version number to modesty, not lack
>> of usefulness.
>
> --
> ======================================================================
> Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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>



--
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com

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