OSGi Test Suites
I am currently working on the most important, but also very boring, part of the obligations we have in the OSGi Alliance: the test suites. This time around it was a bit different though, we had a single company writing most of the test suites. Normally this is more dispersed. CESAR is a Brazilian research institute that was hired by IBM and Motorola to provide many of the required test suites, and they have done a thorough job. The requirements of the test suites were higher for this release because we will license the test suites to any company that wants to be compliant with JSR 232. The test suites are of course free for any OSGi Alliance member.

The test suites are based on the nowadays standard JUnit model. The key difference is that we deploy them as bundles. We include a facility that allows test suites to run on the target machine and a facilitating machine, this setup makes it impossible to use a single bundle for a test suite. The facilitating machine sets up the environment and then downloads a testcase to the target. The target executes the testcases that can interact with the facilitating machine. This makes it possible to minimize the requirements on the target machine and removes the need for manual interaction. This has turned out to be a very elegant model, we are very happy with it.

But these weeks we have to get all the parts together, coming from several continents, and quite a lot of people. Lot of work, but fortunately, it looks like we are getting there.

There are discussion going on to make the OSGi test tooling available outside the OSGi Alliance. If you are interested, let us know.

Peter Kriens
OSGi Evangelist