Sirius: ruby package installation testing

All Sirius client components are delivered as installable packages. And for Java and C# they are easy to use just by putting references to appropriate binaries. The Ruby packages are easy to install but it's hard to predict in advance whether they reference properly to all necessary resources. That's because any code becomes accessible via adding reference to the path in the file rather than including package name.

The key difference is that local relative paths work OK only for local sources but when you create Ruby package and install it those paths will be applied relatively to completely different folder. So, if you run local unit tests you don't have guarantee that all the code would work in the same fashion as it would work from the gem location. For this purpose, I've added separate class of tests into Sirius Ruby client packages. This class of tests is called installation tests. The main aim of them is to make sure that all modules are properly accessible after the package is installed. And in general it verifies that packages are operational after installation process.

Sirius: running as windows service

Sirius server part is delivered as a set of Java archives and this part is initiated via command line interface. It brings some inconveniences while running the tests. Thus, before start using client API we should make sure that the server is up and running. Of course, we can do that manually but:

1. we should be able to do that automatically
2. when we test client side we shouldn't touch server side at all

So, it's quite convenient to deliver Sirius Server start/stop process to the system. For Windows it can be done by setting server component as the windows service. Since, Sirius Server is just another Java application it requires some additional efforts for making such task however such task appeared multiple times. Here are the related topics on StackOverflow:

• Install java program as a windows service: Alternative to JavaService?
• How to create a windows service from java app

So, I'm looking for something similar for Sirius Server. In this post I'll describe the settings needed for making Sirius Java application running as the windows service.

Sirius: Adding code style checks

We already set up the build process for Sirius as well as we reserved the placeholders for testing. So, further improvement in this area is to extend build with different tests and checkpoints which make more detail verification. This time we'll add more modules which perform static testing for our components and they should fail the build if static checks didn't pass (especially taking into account that it was initially planned).

What would we look for? Basically that's:

• Conformity to coding standards - all code standards are made to provide unified approach of writing code as well as reading and maintaining it.
• Various cases of improper code usage - a lot of actual application errors are results of improper code use or use of potentially dangerous code constructions. So, the earlier we find them the less number of silly mistakes we take during further testing stages

Actually, we've made first approximation for that while we checked the compilation ability. If system isn't compilable it's not working at all. So, we're just making more detailed checks.

Since Sirius modules use different programming languages the tool set will be varying based on that. We'll use the following tool set for that:

Language	Engine
Java	Check Style PMD
C#	StyleCop
Ruby	rubocop

OK. Let's see how it would be added.