Re: [Owasp-input-api-developers] Testing tool/framework and development platform survey

[Alex R. <al...@se...>]

On Sun, 18 Aug 2002, Christopher Todd wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I've been working on an automated tool for unit testing the Filters API.
> The purpose of the tool is to validate that the API functions/methods
> perform as expected.  Before I put much more effort into it, though, I
> wanted to ask the group a few questions.
> 
> 1)  Will this be helpful and/or valuable?

Yes. Incredibly so.
 
> 2)  I was planning on building the tool around Ant, a Java/XML based build
> tool, and HTTPUnit, a web application unit testing tool.  You won't need to
> know Java to construct test cases, just a little XML.  But for those of you
> developing the ASP, Perl or PHP ports of the API, would you be annoyed about
> having to install Java and Ant on your development boxes?

I think that any test environment is going to necessarialy be slightly
complex (involved a web server, correctly configured languages, etc...),
so I don't (personally) feel that Java/Ant is a problem. If anyone is
dead set against it, speak up now = )

> 3)  I was planning on having the tool create .jsp, .asp., .php, etc. files
> that take the specified input and run it through the Filter API
> functions/methods, but this requires deploying those pages in a working web
> server environment.  May I safely assume that everyone working on the
> various languages will have access to such a setup?

Probably not. I think it'll be a better bet to find one environment
against which we can test most of these languages and then spit back
reports about what succeeded and what failed. Not sure there's a need
for each of us to configure servers to support all (or even most) of
these languages. It can only get more complex when we introduce DBs into
the mix, so for the time being I'm going to advocate a central testing
setup of some sort. Not sure how we'll make it a reality (suggestions
welcome), but it seems a good way to start.

> And finally, just out of curiosity, what development platforms is everyone
> using?  I use Emacs on Linux, Win98 and Win2k.  I have access to Apache
> (w/Perl & PHP) on Linux, Tomcat on any platform, and IIS 5.

I've got access to Apache on Linux and OpenBSD supporting  Python, PHP, 
Tomcat/JSP, and Perl.

For editing I use vim with 8-space tabs, and tabs-as-tabs (no auto-space
insertion).

-- 
Alex Russell
al...@Se...
al...@ne...