After living in the land of Ruby with RSpec, thinking about JUnit did not excite me.  Thankfully I found the rspec-maven-plugin, which integrates straight into the maven test process.

I like rspec because it removes a whole lot of the cruft involved in writing tests.  When I return to the specs weeks later, I can still read the intent.  So often, with JUnit tests named with cryptic method names, it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what’s intended to be tested.

The beta-4 plugin on the repository is based on jruby-1.1.2, but in SVN I’ve updated it to support 1.1.4.  I think there’s still some more improvements to be made, such as respecting maven.test.skip and getting rid of the need for JRUBY_HOME pointing to a full installation. (Note: I did not write this plugin, I’ve just started contributing to it).

After a little configuration of the plugin in your pom.xml…

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
  <artifactId>rspec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <!-- jrubyHome points to the JRuby installation you wish to use (usually ${env.JRUBY_HOME}) -->
    <jrubyHome>${env.JRUBY_HOME}</jrubyHome>
    <!-- sourceDirectory references where your RSpec tests reside -->
    <sourceDirectory>${basedir}/src/test/specs</sourceDirectory>
    <!-- outputDirectory specifies where the RSpec report should be placed -->
    <outputDirectory>${basedir}/target</outputDirectory>
    <!--<skipTests>true</skipTests>-->
  </configuration>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>test</id>
      <phase>test</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>spec</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

Now, just start flinging out specs in ./src/test/specs/.

This is a portion of a test against a JBoss-VFS VirtualFileHandler implementation, written in Java in WarRootHandler.java:

describe WarRootHandler do

  before(:each) do
    @context = RailsAppContextFactory.getInstance.createRoot( "ballast", File.dirname( __FILE__ ) + '/../ballast' )
    @root = @context.get_war_root_handler
  end

  it "should have a rails:// URL" do
    @root.to_uri.to_string.should eql( "rails://ballast/" )
  end

  it "should be resolvable through java URL handlers" do
    url = java.net.URL.new( "rails://ballast/" )
    url.to_s.should_not be_nil
  end

  it "should delegate for WEB-INF requests" do
    web_inf = @root.get_child( 'WEB-INF' )
    web_inf.should_not be_nil
    jboss_rails_yml = web_inf.get_child( 'jboss-rails.yml' )
    jboss_rails_yml.should_not be_nil
  end
end