[Cppunit-devel] distributed environment

[Michel A. <Arm...@si...>]

Hi all.

Motivation:

I am planning to use CppUnit in a typical client/server scenario, where some
of the TestCases have to be performed in Backend (BE). Since the results
etc. have to be displayed in the Client/Frontend (FE) of course, I have to
transfer data from BE to FE. Because I want to take advantage of the already
existing CppUnit-MFC-dialog, I thought it would be pretty nice if we could
add a kind of serialization support to at least some of the CppUnit classes.


Approach/Solution:

In fact, it would be enough if all the classes would be "serializable" that
are used for notifying the TestResult. A TestResult object (living in BE) in
turn would notify a special observer which would then transmit these
information to FE where it can be distributed to the "ordinary"
TestListener.

Using this approach it should be possible to have a BE/FE separation which
is completely transparent to the rest of the system (e.g. progress bar in
the dialog etc.). And because of this transparence it would still be
possible to use any kind of TestListener in FE, which I think is very
important with respect to exensibility.

Implementation:

Since the exact format of "transferable" objects is quite dependent on the
environment, I would suggest to use an iostream based approach. Being a
Java-Programmer, the following idea comes to my mind:

class Exception {
	Exception(istream& is);

	// ...
	public:
		void writeObject(ostream& os);
		void readObject(istream& is);
};

Exception::Exception(istream& is) { readObject(is); }
Exception::writeObject(ostream& os) { os << state1 << " " << state2; }
Exception::readObject(istream& is) { is >> state1 >> state2; }

Suggestions:

What are you thinking about this topic? Do you know a more C++ like way to
do the serialization? Or some completely different approach?


Regards

Armin (bored) Michel