Aerial: Create New Project Using Archetype

Since 0.0.5 version Aerial has an ability to generate Java projects from archetypes to get sample working project quickly. In this post I'll describe the steps for doing this.

Problem Solved: run TestNG test from JUnit using Maven

Background

Recently I've been developing some applicaiton component which was supposed to run with TestNG. Actually, it was another extension of TestNG test. So, in order to test that functionality I had to emulate TestNG suite run within the test body. Well, performing TestNG run programmatically wasn't a problem. It can be done using code like:

import org.testng.TestListenerAdapter;
import org.testng.TestNG;

.......
        TestListenerAdapter tla = new TestListenerAdapter();
        TestNG testng = new TestNG();
        testng.setTestClasses(new Class[] {SomeTestClass.class});
        testng.addListener(tla);
        testng.run();
.......

where SomeTestClass is some existing TestNG class. This can be even used with JUnit (which was my case as I mainly used JUnit for the test suite). So, technically TestNG can be executed from JUnit test and vice versa.

Problem

The problem appeared when I tried to run JUnit test performing TestNG run via Maven. Normally tests are picked up using surefire plugin which can be included into Maven pom.xml file with the entry like this:

 <plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.18.1</version>
 </plugin>

If you use JUnit only it picks up JUnit tests. In my case I also used JUnit for running test suites but one test required TestNG test class (actually the class with TestNG @Test annotation) as well as I had to add TestNG Maven dependency. In this case only this TestNG class was executed during test run. So, how to let Maven know that I want to run exactly JUnit tests but not TestNG ones while both of them are present within the same Maven project?

NBehave vs SpecFlow Comparison

It's always good when you use some technology and you have a choice between various tools/engines. In some cases it makes a problem like it happens sometimes with BDD Engines especially when we have to choose between similar engines which are widely used and at first glance they seem to be identical. Some time ago I've made JBehave vs Cucumber-JVM comparison to spot some differences and comparative characteristics of the most evolved engines in Java world. And as I can see from the pge views statistics it's quite interesting topic. At the same there is .NET technology which has another set of BDD engines. And they are quite popular as well. So, in this world we may encounter question like: What is better, NBehave or SpecFlow ?

This answer isn't so trivial. When I did cross-platform BDD Engines comparison almost 3 years ago some of the engines weren't well enough or at least their documentation was on low level. At that time NBehave didn't seem to look well. But since that time a lot of things changed and now both NBehave and SpecFlow are turned into full-featured Gherkin interpreter engines. So, the choice of better tool among then isn't so trivial anymore. It means we'll start new comparison between NBehave or SpecFlow

So, let's find out who's winner in this battle!!!