Speeding Up Development With Fitnesse
I use fitnesse a lot for acceptance testing, and as an “over optimizer” i was recently bugged by one thing I felt slows me down… having to redeploy over and over when writing fixtures. Sometimes you whip up a fixture that has simple functionality and deploy, only to discover you goofed somewhere and it doesn’t work. Wouldn’t it be nice to just quickly edit and save fixtures?
This is where my current fascination with Groovy intersects with my fixture writing madness. I was toying with Groovy earlier today after work and thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to just edit groovy files and save them, and have fitnesse use them?” And tongiht I’ve done just that (although rather hackishly). I wrote a WikiWidget plugin that basically les you define a groovy source file directory (much like the !path wikiWidget) that essentially pulls them into the classpath. All that is required is to have the groovy.jar in the classpath, and it works flawlessly.
It’s late, and I’m sure there’s bugs, so once I clean it up I’ll make it availble for everyone to use. 
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June 20th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Good stuff- thanks for posting it. I just had this realization myself this morning about groovy + fit(nesse) and happened upon your post. Have you come to any conclusions if this is a good combination or not?
June 21st, 2007 at 12:45 am
Not. I didn’t play much with it, and granted I think an editor from within fitnesse that allows you to edit and save groovy code for fixtures would probably be superb.
However, I’ve had very good luck by just pointing a path to my project’s compile directory while developing, allowing my to edit fixtures and/or code, and run it without having to go through a build process.Since this was pretty quick for me, I gave up investigating groovy + fitnesse. I should pick it up though and see where it goes.