Clean the mess with XStream

Writing clean, isolated and efficient unit test is often a challenge for developers. Efficient test should cover all the possible business scenarios. To create test for covering multiple test scenarios, you need more test data.

For instance, imagine you are writing a test for some Service component. Now if the responsibility of this service is to just collect some data from DAO Layer and pass it on to Business Delegate, life is easy. You can create a mock for DAO using frameworks like EasyMock and you are done. But that’s not often the case. For testing services with complex business logic, its not sufficient to return dummy data. In this case, we create the expected test data and mock the DAO to return the expected data. If this input seed is a simple object, its few additional lines of code and we are done. But what if the test is dealing with complex data model? Normal practice that I observed amongst developers is some private methods are created deep down the test to generate test data – generateXXX().

Situation becomes more worse when after few months there are some changes in the domain model. The developer opens the test and the thought to fix the clumsy code can really make him fussy. If he is not religious about unit testing, he might try to fix the test data instead of test and the whole motivation is at stake. Don’t worry. XStream @ Rescue.

XStream is a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again. It supports de-serialization to nested object structure.

Input XML:
<person>
  <firstname>Joe</firstname>
  <lastname>Walnes</lastname>
  <phone>
    <code>123</code>
    <number>1234-456</number>
  </phone>
  <fax>
    <code>123</code>
    <number>9999-999</number>
  </fax>
</person>

Conversion Code:
XStream xstream = new XStream();
xstream.alias("person", Person.class);
xstream.alias("phone", PhoneNumber.class);
Person newJoe = (Person)xstream.fromXML(xml);

As you can see, creation of nested objects is extremely easy with XStream. We just need to create aliases for Custom classes to XML elements. That’s the only configuration required to work with XStream. XStream is lightweight, simple and does not support validations. If you need XML to Object conversion with validations and complex business rules, Commons Digester could be the choice.

With this approach you can create a XML for the test scenario and de-serialize in the test. The test would definitely take a bit longer to execute but is more clean, readable and maintainable.

Thinking Performance

Have you ever spent days rewriting the whole application burning the midnight oil? Well, I don’t think you are the only one. In early days of my career I also made similar mistakes or was a victim of mistakes made by fellow developers. Having taken this roller coaster ride, spending sleepless nights fixing the code, I learned a new mantra – Tune Early Tune Often. In most of the enterprise development cycles, performance testing and tuning is done pretty late. Typically we start worrying about it during system testing and by the time (if at all) application goes into UAT phase, performance becomes the critical requirement. So if we are building applications where performance is as important as any other functional requirements, why not invest some time addressing it in early development phase?