Spike Source has commenced work on TestGen4J, "a collection of open-source tools that automatically generates unit test cases. The first released component of TestGen is TestGen4J. TestGen4J automatically generates test cases from your own Java class files, or source files. Its primary focus is to exercise boundary value testing of the arguments passed to the method. It uses a rules engine, with a user-configurable XML file, that defines boundary conditions for the data types. The test code is separated from test data with the help of JTestCase." The current version is alpha 2.
I tried this out on XOM. The private constructors in some of my classes seemed to confuse it. I tried it on Jaxen, but CLASSPATH issues seemed to throw it. Overall it doesn;t feel ready for practical use.
Cedric Beust has released TestNG 4.0, an open source testing (unit, functional, and integration) framework based on annotations. This should have been labelled TestNG 3.0, but the developers didn't want a version number less than JUnit's. Version 4.0 adds data providers, methods that return two-dimensional arrays of test data to be used as test parameters. I'm not sure why a two-doimensional array is used here rather than an iterator. A 2-D array is simpler, but an iterator would be a lot less heavyweight since objects could be created before each test and disposed after each test rather than having everything initialized upfront. TestNG is released under the Apache Software License. Java 1.4 or later is required.
I've updated the conferences page. If you know of any other Java-centric conferences I'm missing, please send in their info. This Saturday I'll be at the first Weekend with Experts show in New York to talk about Effective XML. In November I'll talk about testing XML at both STPCon and STARWest. In December, the Weekend with Experts arrives in Philadelphia, where I'll talk about Effective XML one more time. In January, I'll be at the XML Developers Network of the Capital District in Albany on the 17th to talk about XOM; and on February 8, I'll be at the Capital District Java Developers Network, also in Albany, to talk about Measuring JUnit Code Coverage. Then in March it's back to Santa Clara for Software Development 2006 West. If you'd like me to talk to your user group, just send me an e-mail. I do ask that groups outside the New York City area cover my travel expenses, though sometimes we can piggy back a user group talk on top of a conference in the same general vicinity. See you there!
JCraft, Inc has posted JSch 0.1.23, an open source, pure Java implementation of SSH2 that supports port forwarding, X11 forwarding, file transfer, etc. This version adds some minor features including handling hostkeys included in known_hosts file and setting timeout values for opening sockets. Java 1.2 or later and the JCE are required. JSch is released under a BSD license. This release fixes bugs.