Karl Brodowsky's IT-Blog – Seite 23 – IT Sky Consulting GmbH

Frameworks for Unit Testing and Mocking

Unit testing has fortunately become an important issue in many software projects. The idea of automatic software based unit and integration tests is actually quite old. The typical Linux software that is downloaded as source code and then built with steps like
tar xfzvv «software-name-with-version».tar.gz cd «software-name-with-version» ./configure make sudo make install
often allows a step
make test
or
make check
or even both before the
make install
It was like that already in the 1990s, when the word „unit test“ was unknown and the whole concept had not been popularized to the main stream.

What we need is to write those automated tests to an extent that we have good confidence that the software will be reliable enough in terms of bugs if it passes the test suite. The tests can be written in any language and I do encourage you to think about using other languages, in order to be less biased and more efficient for writing the tests. We may choose to write a software in C, C++ or Java for the sake of efficiency or easier integration into the target platform. But these languages are efficient in their usages of CPU power, but not at all efficient in using developer time to write a lot of functionality. This is ok for most projects, because the effort it takes to develop with these languages is accepted in exchange for the anticipated benefits. For testing it is another issue.

On the other hand there are of course advantages in using actually the same language for writing the tests, because it is easier to access the APIs and even internal functionalities during the tests. So it may very well be that Unit tests are written in the same language as the software and this is actually what I am doing most of the time. But do think twice about your choice.

Now writing automated tests is actually no magic. It does not really need frameworks, but is quite easy to accomplish manually. All we need is kind of two areas in our source code tree. One area that goes into the production code and one area that is only used for the tests and remains on the development and continuous integration machines. Since writing automated tests without frameworks is not really a big deal, we should only look at frameworks that are really simple and easy to use or maybe give us really good features that we actually need. This is the case with many such frameworks, so the way to go is to actually use them and save some time and make the structure more accessible to other team members, who know the same testing framework. Writing and running unit tests should be really easy, otherwise it is not done or the unit tests are disabled and loose contact to the actual software and become worthless.

Bugs are much more expensive, the later they are discovered. So we should try to find as many of them while developing. Writing unit tests and automated integrated tests is a good thing and writing them early is even better. The pure test driven approach does so before actually writing the code. I recommend this for bug fixing, whenever possible.

There is one exception to this rule. When writing GUIs, automated testing is possible, but quite hard. Now we should have UX guys involved and we should present them with some early drafts of the software. If we had already developed elaborate selenium tests by then, it would be painful to change the software according to the advice of the UX guy and rewrite the tests. So I would keep it flexible until we are on the same page as the UX guys and add the tests later in this area.

Frameworks that I like are actually CUnit for C, JUnit for Java, where TestNG would be a viable alternative, and Google-Test for C++. CUnit works extremely well on Linux and probably on other Unix-like systems like Solaris, Aix, MacOSX, BSD etc. There is no reason why it should not work on MS-Windows. With cygwin actually it is extremely easy to use it, but with native Win32/Win64 it seems to need an effort to get this working, probably because MS-Windows is no priority for the developers of CUnit.

Now we should use our existing structures, but there can be reasons to mock a component or functionality. It can be because during the development a component does not exist. Maybe we want to see if the component is accessed the right way and this is easier to track with a mock that records the calls than with the real thing that does some processing and gives us only the result. Or maybe we have a component with is external and not always available or available, but too time consuming for most of our tests.

Again mocking is no magic and can be done without tools and frameworks. So the frameworks should again be very easy and friendly to use, otherwise they are just a pain in the neck. Early mocking frameworks were often too ambitious and too hard to use and I would have avoided them whenever possible. In Java mocking manually is quite easy. We just need an interface of the mocked component and create an implementing class. Then we need to add all missing methods, which tools like eclipse would do for us, and change some of them. That’s it. Now we have mockito for Java and Google-Mock, which is now part of Google-Test, for C++. In C++ we create a class that behaves similar to a Java interface by having all methods pure virtual with keyword „virtual“ and „=0“ instead of the implementation. The destructor is virtual with an empty implementation. They are so easy to use and they provide useful features, so they are actually good ways to go.

For C the approach is a little bit harder. We do not have the interfaces. So the way to go is to create a library of the code that we want to test and that should go to production. Then we write one of more c-files for the test, that will and up in an executable that actually runs the test. In these .c-files we can provide a mock-implementation for any function and it takes precedence of the implementation from the library. For complete tests we will need to have more than one executable, because in each case the set of mocked functions is fixed within one executable. There are tools in the web to help with this. I find the approach charming to generate the C-code for the mocked functions from the header files using scripts in the a href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)“>Ruby programming language or in the Perl programming language.

Automated testing is so important that I strongly recommend to do changes to the software in order to make it accessible to tests, of course within reason. A common trick is to make certain Java methods package private and have the tests in the same package, but a different directory. Document why they are package private.

It is important to discuss and develop the automated testing within the team and find and improve a common approach. Laziness is a good thing. But laziness means running many automated tests and avoid some manual testing, not being too lazy to write them and eventually spending more time on manual repetitive activities.

I can actually teach this in a two-day or three-day course.

The Language Issue

I had started a poll about the issue if this blog should be written in German or in English.

I would consider it a tie, but I have established the habit of writing this blog in English and translating a small fraction of the articles to German and I will keep it like that for now. If you want to volunteer for translating more articles, please let me know.

Ich habe eine Umfrage gestartet, um die Frage zu klären, in welcher Sprache dieser Blog geschrieben werden sollte.

Ich sehe das Ergebnis als unentschieden an, aber nun habe ich seit etwa 18 Monaten auf Englisch geschrieben und nur sporadisch einzelne Artikel auf Deutsch übersetzt. Das wird in der nächsten Zeit auch so bleiben. Wenn sich jemand engagieren möchte, um mehr Artikel zu übersetzen, bin ich dafür natürlich aufgeschlossen.

Here are the results:

Perl Training in Switzerland

Very soon we will have the opportunity to participate in advanced Perl trainings and even some trainings about presentations.

Here are the Details.

I found these trainings useful, when I visited them. They are done by Damian Conway, one of the core developers of the Perl programming language.

The courses will be held in English. Other than in previous years the location will be in FHNW in walking distance of the railroad station of Brugg or if you are more road oriented in walking distance of the point where the Swiss national highways 5 and 3 meet in Brugg. You can find it on the map.

Microsoft SQL Server will be available for Linux in 2017

Deutsch

Microsoft has officially announced that their database MS SQL Server will become available for Linux in 2017.

I think the time has come for this. Since the departure of Steve Ballmer Microsoft has become a little bit less religous and more pragmatic. There are good reasons to be skeptical about companies like Microsoft and Oracle, but having more competition and more choice is a good thing. Maybe the database product from Oracle is slightly better than MS SQL Server, but there are very few projects where this difference really matters. So now we have five important relational DB products: DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL-Server, PostgreSQL and MariaDB (the successor of mySQL). When starting a new project with no specific constraints about the DB I would usually look at PostgreSQL first, because it is a feature rich and powerful open source database. Since database products are usually something that cannot reasonably be changed within one software system for decades this is a good thing, because we never know what the big companies want to do in such a long time scale. If the migration to another DB product is easy, then the software does not really make use of the power and the features of the DB. And it will not be easy anyway.

There are a lot of cases where the combination of MS-SQL-Server with Linux will make a lot of sense. Since there are software systems that make use of this DB product, it gives the flexibility to run the DB on Linux servers. And maybe avoid an expensive migration to another DB product. As I already said it gives one more choice. In development environments where MS-products are commonly used, it gives one more combination. And eventually it will encourage Oracle and IBM a little bit to refrain from excessive price increases.

Microsoft SQL-Server ab 2017 auch für Linux

English

Microsoft hat angekündigt, den MS-SQL-Server auch für Linux anzubieten.

Ja, die Zeit ist reif dafür. Es gibt genug Gründe, Vorbehalte gegen die Firmen Microsoft und Oracle zu haben, aber deren DB-Produkte sind gut und wenn es mehr Konkurrenz gibt, ist das auch gut. Ich denke, dass Oracle noch etwas besser ist, aber andererseits ist es nur ein sehr kleiner Teil der Projekte, bei denen es auf diesen Unterschied ankommt. Weiterhin stehen natürlich noch mit DB2, MariaDB und vor allem PostgreSQL noch interessante DB-Produkte zur Verfüng, auch unter Linux.

Links:

How to make a scanned PDF smaller (Linux)

When scanning a paper, it is possible to use a lot of parameters within xsane. The output format can be chosen also, for example PNG, JPG or PDF. The outcome may be a PDF-file that is way too big, easily more than 10 megabytes for a single page. It is quite easy to transform it to a smaller file:

convert -density 200x200 -quality 60 -compress jpeg \ big-scanned-file.pdf compressed-scanned-file.pdf

Unless you scan very often, it is easier to scan once with a relatively high resolution and then run this conversion with different values for quality and density rather than running the time consuming scan with different xsane settings.

Chemnitzer Linux-Tage

In the German city Chemnitz the conference „Chemnitzer Linux-Tage“ (Chemnitz Linux days)
will take place from 2016-03-19 to 2016-03-20.

Links:
* Informatik aktuell (German)
* Wikipedia (German)
* Offiical page (German)

Laziness

In conservative circles, laziness has a slightly negative connotation, but in IT it should be seen positive, if we understand it right. If we as humans get our job done in a more efficient way, by working less, this laziness is a good thing. So let’s be lazy by becoming more efficient. For now, just remember, that laziness is something good.

Laziness in software refers to performing a certain operation only when needed. Imagine we store a value that is the result of some calculation in a data structure. We can only have read access to this value, speaking in the Java-world it is a „getter“. Under certain circumstances it is functionally equivalent to store the function that calculates the value instead and to call it whenever the getter is called. Usually this is combined with the memoize pattern, so the value is retained, once it has been calculated. This whole idea breaks down if the function to calculate the value has side effects, is influenced by side effects or generally does not yield the same result on the same inputs whenever it is called. Obviously for implementing such a lazy value the parameters for the function have to be retained as well, either by storing them in the structure as well or by wrapping the function and the parameters into a parameter-less function that includes them. Obviously these parameters have to be immutable for this approach to work.

Now the question is, what do we gain from this kind of laziness?
At first glance we gain nothing, because the calculation has to be done anyway and we are just procrastinating it, so the eventual calculation of whatever we are doing will be expensive. Actually this might not be true. It is quite possible, that the value is never needed, so it would be wasteful to calculate it in advance.

Actually many of us have seen both approaches in text books for Java or C++, when the singleton pattern is explained. The typical implementation looks like this:

public class S { private static S instance = null;


    public static synchronized S getInstance() {

        if (instance == null) {

            instance = new S();

        }

        return instance;

    }
    public S() {

        // ...

    }

//... }

This „synchronized“ is a bit of a pain, but necessary to ensure that the instance is created only once. Smart people came up with the „double-check-pattern“, so it looked like this:
public class S { private static S instance = null;


    public static S getInstance() {

        if (instance == null) {

            synchronized (S.class) {

                if (instance == null) {

                    instance = new S();

                }

            }

        }

        return instance;

    }
    public S() {

        // ...

    }

//... }

It is kind of cute, because it takes into account that after the first check and before acquiring the synchronized-lock some other thread already initializes it. It is supposed to work with newer Java versions, but for sure going to fail in older versions. This is due to the memory management model. Anyway it is kind of scary, because we observe that something that really looks correct won’t work anyway. Or even worse, it will work fine during testing and miserably fail on production when we don’t expect it. But it would be so easy with eager initialization:
public class S { private static S instance = new S();


    public static S getInstance() {

        return instance;

    }
    public S() {

        // ...

    }

//... }
Or use even an enum to implement the singleton.

Other language like Scala support this kind of laziness in a more natural way.
case class S(s : String) { lazy val t : String = (s + s); def tt() : String = { t } }
In this case t would be calculated when tt is called the first time.

In this example it does not help a lot, because the calculation of t is so cheap. But imagine we wanted to create a huge collection and then start doing something with the elements until we reach a certain goal. Eagerly initializing the collection would blow up our program, but we may be able to iterate through it or work with the first $n$ elements where $n$ is significantly smaller than the size of the collection would be. Just think of it as an iterate-only-collection or as a collection that is too big to keep it in memory completely.

Just do this in Clojure:
(def r (range 1000000000000N))
It would define a collection with $10^{12}$ elements, which would most likely exceed our memory. But it is accepted and we can do stuff with it as long as we are dealing only with elements near to the beginning. It could know its size, but it does not, so
(count r)
will fail or take forever. Or maybe work in some future version of Clojure…

So laziness allows us to write more elegant, expressive programs that have a good efficiency. Off course this can all be written by ourselves without such help, but it is a good laziness to rely on programming languages, libraries or tools that allow us to do it in such an elegant way.

Now we can find out that Hibernate and JPA use some kind of laziness. They have to, because objects tend to be connected and fetching one would require to fetch a really big bunch. Unfortunately the laziness is simply not correct, because we do have side effects, that influence the outcome. That is what databases are… So data may change, transactions may have been committed or rolled back or whatever. We get „LazyLoadingException“, when we try to access some data. And when we try to adopt a beautiful programming style that mimics functional patters in Java with non-static inner classes (prior to Java 8) in conjunction with Hibernate, it will be bound to fail miserably unless we apply absolute care about this issue.

While we are always moving on thin ice with this side-effect-dependent laziness of Hibernate and JPA, it will be really powerful in functional languages like Scala, Clojure or Haskell if we are going the extra mile to ensure that the function does not have side effects and does not depend on side effects or get influenced by side effects.

Update of captcha-Plugin does not work

My wordpress installation suggested the update of a plugin for captcha, but it actually failed with an error message mentioning permissions and the files „captcha/cache/index.php“ and „captcha/cache/.htaccess“.
What did help:
In the directory of the wordpress-installation go to
wp-content/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/captcha/cache
Then delete the files index.php and .htaccess
Make a backup of them outside of the wordpress installation before deleting them.
Run update again.
This time it should work.
This is what I was able to do with my wordpress installations.
I am running 4.4.2–de_DE.

So it worked for me, that’s all I can say about this issue.

Clojure

Functional programming languages have become a bit of a hype.

But the ideas are not really so new.
The first languages beyond Assembly language that have maintained some relevance up to today were FORTRAN, COBOL and Lisp. Indirectly also Algol, because it inspired pretty much any modern mainstream programming language in some way through some intermediate ancestors. The early Algol Variants itself have disappeared .

It can be argued if the early Lisp Dialects were really functional languages, but they did support some functional patterns and made them popular at least in certain communities. I would say that popular scripting languages like the Ruby programming language, the Perl programming language, the Lua programming language and especially JavaScript brought them to the main stream.

Lisp has always remained in its niche. But the question arose on creating a new Lisp that follows more strictly the functional paradigm and is somewhat more modern, cleaner and simpler than the traditional Lisps. It was done and it is called Clojure.

So anybody who has never used any Lisp will at first be lost, because it is a jungle of parentheses „((((())))()()()(…)“ with some minor stuff in between…
Actually that is an issue, when we move from today’s common languages to Clojure. But it is not that bad. The infix-notation is familiar to us, but it has its benefits to use one simple syntax for almost everything.

An expression that consists of a function call is written like this (function-name param1 param2 parm3...). +, -, *,…. are just functions like anything else, so if we want to write $3\cdot4 + 5\cdot6$ we just write $(+ (* 3 4) (* 5 6))$ .

In the early days of calculators it was easier to build something that works with a notion called „RPN“, so there we would write 3 ENTER 4 * 5 ENTER 6 * +, which is similar to the Lisp way, but just the other way round.

It is easy to add a different number of values:
* (+) -> 0
* (+ 7) -> 7
* (+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7) -> 28

In Clojure functions are just normal values like numbers, arrays, lists,… that can be passed around.. It is good programming practice to rely on this where it helps. And with more experience it will be helpful more often.

Immutability is king. Most of the default structures of Clojure are immutable. They can be passed around without the fear that they might change once they have been constructed. This helps for multithreading.

Clojure provides lists, arrays, sets, hashmaps, and the sorted variants of the latter. These can be written easily:
* List: (list 1 2 3) -> (1 2 3) (entries are evaluated in this case)
* List: '(1 2 3) -> (1 2 3) (entries are not evaluated in this case)
* Array: [1 2 3] (entries are evaluated in this case)
* Set: #{1 2 3} (entries are evaluated in this case)
* Map: {1 2, 3 4} (entries are evaluated in this case. key-value-Pairs are usually grouped with a comma, which is whitespace for Clojure)

All of these are immutable. So methods that change collections, always create a copy that contains the changes. The copy can be done lazily or share data with the original.

Actually I can teach Clojure in course of two to five days duration depending on the experience of the participants and the goals they want to achieve.

There is much more to write about Clojure…