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Re: [xsl] XSLT Unit testing

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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.

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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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