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I looked at TAP when I had to implement a testing tool for my own language. In the end, I didn't really see the point of using TAP. Is anyone using it outside

by Athas 6y ago

I looked at TAP when I had to implement a testing tool for my own language. In the end, I didn't really see the point of using TAP. Is anyone using it outside Perl? What are its specific advantages compared to using common testing libraries?

ForHackernews 6y ago
Same motivation as JUnit, I guess: it's a common protocol that different testing tools can all agree to speak/understand.
- asdkhadsj 6y ago
  What's the advantage? While a common protocol at first glance sounds nice, I'd imagine the devil and validity of any test is in the actual implementation. So TAP, as far as I can tell is just a BDD spec.. which basically just amounts to some lines of text for someone to write BDD against. Am I missing something? I was actually recently looking into BDD-like tools recently, so I feel like I'm a potential user for TAP, but I just can't grok the value add in it offhand. edit: oh, maybe TAP is the inverse of what I was thinking. It's about output of test suites, for common post-test tooling? Aka to give statuses about the state of tests?
jchw 6y ago
> Is anyone using it outside Perl? I first saw it used with JavaScript, so I assume yes; but the site itself answers this, too. (specifically the producers and consumers pages.) I think it is of limited use if you can use any of the more sophisticated defacto standards like JUnit compatible output. Still, you can imagine scenarios where a stupidly simple test protocol would be nice. One fairly esoteric use case might be test ROMs for CPU emulators; today many of them output results to serial in some format, but AFAIK there is no unification of the format at all, across different test ROMs.
kinow 6y ago
I used it with Java with tap4j (https://tupilabs.com/tap4j/ https://tupilabs.com/tap4j/). For my project I needed a multi-language format to use in Jenkins. Ended up quickly writing tap4j and the Jenkins TAP Plugin. Both were used by multiple users back at the time, and we managed to integrate the test results of the projects (PHP, Java, and some JavaScript) through TAP in Jenkins, reporting the test coverage too (in the YAMLish, which is not exactly part of the TAP spec, unless the latest release included it)

by Athas 6y ago

ForHackernews 6y ago

Same motivation as JUnit, I guess: it's a common protocol that different testing tools can all agree to speak/understand.

asdkhadsj 6y ago
What's the advantage? While a common protocol at first glance sounds nice, I'd imagine the devil and validity of any test is in the actual implementation. So TAP, as far as I can tell is just a BDD spec.. which basically just amounts to some lines of text for someone to write BDD against. Am I missing something? I was actually recently looking into BDD-like tools recently, so I feel like I'm a potential user for TAP, but I just can't grok the value add in it offhand. edit: oh, maybe TAP is the inverse of what I was thinking. It's about output of test suites, for common post-test tooling? Aka to give statuses about the state of tests?

jchw 6y ago

> Is anyone using it outside Perl? I first saw it used with JavaScript, so I assume yes; but the site itself answers this, too. (specifically the producers and consumers pages.) I think it is of limited use if you can use any of the more sophisticated defacto standards like JUnit compatible output. Still, you can imagine scenarios where a stupidly simple test protocol would be nice. One fairly esoteric use case might be test ROMs for CPU emulators; today many of them output results to serial in some format, but AFAIK there is no unification of the format at all, across different test ROMs.

kinow 6y ago

I used it with Java with tap4j (https://tupilabs.com/tap4j/ https://tupilabs.com/tap4j/). For my project I needed a multi-language format to use in Jenkins. Ended up quickly writing tap4j and the Jenkins TAP Plugin. Both were used by multiple users back at the time, and we managed to integrate the test results of the projects (PHP, Java, and some JavaScript) through TAP in Jenkins, reporting the test coverage too (in the YAMLish, which is not exactly part of the TAP spec, unless the latest release included it)