cobertura-devel

[Cobertura-devel] Support for earlier JDK's

[Niklas B. <nik...@gm...>]

Just another vote for JDK 1.3.1 support. I'm working in a project
where we want to measure and merge coverage data for our unit and
function tests.

Our unit tests work in JDK 1.4, so we have no problem with those. The
problem is the function tests, as they require the use of a simulator
or the actual target hardware. We're running a custom JVM for a
realtime operating system, and so far it only supports JDK 1.3.1.
There are plans to introduce 1.4 support in the future, but we will
still have to maintain old releases for quite some time.

Officially, we're measuring coverage using a tool from Rational called
TestRT, but it's an absolute nightmare to setup and use. For instance,
HTML reports are static snapshots that can only be generated manually
by pushing a button in the horrible sloth of a GUI app -- I wouldn't
wish this rubbish on my worst enemy. (And to top things off they're
charging us an arm and a leg for it.)

Cobertura is already the superior tool because of its ease-of-use and
pretty presentation format, but with JDK 1.3.x support it would be the
absolute killer!

/Niklas

Re: [Cobertura-devel] Support for earlier JDK's

[Elliotte H. <el...@me...>]

Niklas Backlund wrote:
> Just another vote for JDK 1.3.1 support. I'm working in a project
> where we want to measure and merge coverage data for our unit and
> function tests.
> 

I took a quick look at this. I think they're only about half a dozen 
places where Cobertura uses 1.4 methods, mostly related to the 
java.util.regex package. Classes include

XMLReport
JavaToHTML
Main
CoverageReportTask
MethodInstrumenter
CommonMatchingTask

There's also one use of Character.toString().

I don't think these would be too difficult to remove. If the regular 
expressions are simple enough, we could write the code to do the 
replacements manually. If not, we could fall back on something like the 
ORO regex library instead of java.util.regex. Hmm, looking at a couple 
of the places where it's used regular expressions do seem to be a pretty 
fundamental part of the internals so I suspect using a 3rd party regex 
library would be the preferred option.

It might be a good idea then to have separate 1.3 and 1.4 distros so the 
1.4 version doesn't have to drag along an extra regex library. This can 
be organized in the ant build file easily enough. JDOM does something 
like this to run in both 1.1 with com.sun.util collection classes and in 
1.2 and later with java.util collection classes.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  el...@me...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

Re: [Cobertura-devel] Support for earlier JDK's

[Elliotte H. <el...@me...>]

Niklas Backlund wrote:
> Just another vote for JDK 1.3.1 support. I'm working in a project
> where we want to measure and merge coverage data for our unit and
> function tests.
> 

I took a quick look at this. I think they're only about half a dozen
places where Cobertura uses 1.4 methods, mostly related to the
java.util.regex package. Classes include

XMLReport
JavaToHTML
Main
CoverageReportTask
MethodInstrumenter
CommonMatchingTask

There's also one use of Character.toString().

I don't think these would be too difficult to remove. If the regular
expressions are simple enough, we could write the code to do the
replacements manually. If not, we could fall back on something like the
ORO regex library instead of java.util.regex. Hmm, looking at a couple
of the places where it's used regular expressions do seem to be a pretty
fundamental part of the internals so I suspect using a 3rd party regex
library would be the preferred option.

It might be a good idea then to have separate 1.3 and 1.4 distros so the
1.4 version doesn't have to drag along an extra regex library. This can
be organized in the ant build file easily enough. JDOM does something
like this to run in both 1.1 with com.sun.util collection classes and in
1.2 and later with java.util collection classes.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  el...@me...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim