[Exist-open] Unit tests for web interfaces

[Wolfgang M. <wol...@gm...>]

I just added a few Ant scripts to better test eXist's web integration
and HTTP-based interfaces. While the core database functions and the
XQuery language are well-covered by automated tests, we still lack a
dedicated test suite to ensure that all the application-level
interfaces and especially the XQuery-Web integration work as expected.

I have thus experimented with Canoo's WebTest
(http://webtest.canoo.com) yesterday, which is basically just a set of
Ant tasks to simulate a web client and test the behaviour of a web
application. Writing tests is quite easy once you have a general
skeleton, so I decided to integrate this into eXist. For example, the
following code snip invokes test-modules1.xql and checks if the
returned HTML response body contains <h1>PASS</h1>:

<webtest name="testModuleImports2">
  <config host="localhost" port="8080" protocol="http"
    basepath="exist/rest/db/webtest"
    summary="true" resultpath="${test.results}"/>
  <steps>
    <invoke description="REST: import module from database"
url="test-modules2.xql"/>
    <verifyElementText type="H1" text="PASS"/>
  </steps>
</webtest>

To run the test suite, call Ant from within the root directory of your
eXist installation:

./build.sh -f tools/webtest/build.xml

The first time you run it, the script will try to download and install
the required WebTest Ant tasks from the Canoo web site. It then starts
a Jetty webserver and processes the tests. The queries for the tests
are contained in directory webapp/webtest. After the test suite has
completed, you will find a test report in
test/webtest/html/results.html.

Right now, the test suite contains just 6 simple tests like this to
check module imports for the XQueryServlet/XQueryGenerator/REST. I'd
like to encourage other developers to add more tests here.

Wolfgang