About HTML units
HTMLUnit, for those who are unaware, is basically a piddly little framework that lets you create web requests, and parses back the resultant html/javascript and lets you click on things programatically to simulate actual users.
Thankfully, the name is a total misnomer. For one thing, it’s not about unit testing at all. Therefore, has nothing to do with JUnit. It wisely avoids the spastic route taken by things like xmlunit, which provides classes tightly coupled to JUnit.
The premise is a pretty decent one, it’s the implementation, as usual, which makes the baby jesus cry hot tears of rage and anger while biting off the nearest nipple.
First problem, I see maven crud splattered all over. My heart sinks as I see the 3 tongued kisses of death; maven.xml, project.xml, and project.properties. This cannot possibly go well. Amazingly, there’s a build.xml there too, so I might be spared. I’m not hopeful mind you.
To cut a long story short, the file is a herring sporting a horrific red hue. Making this thing work would require an impressive collection of miracles from all major religions.
So we’re onto maven. Running maven, of course, is always a great excuse for a day out, maybe catch a movie or two, and a nice dinner, while it figures out what day it is, what it should do about it, and how to calculate the worst and slowest way of running a few thousand tests.
Eventually, a feeble jar is farted out. Plopping said jar in my tests reveals a rather dismal result. Cookies no longer work across invocations.
Ohdear. Nevermind, I’m a java guy, I can debug this sort of thing. Armed with nothing more than an abiding hatred for java developers and a trusty debugger, I sally forth into the brackish waters that are the htmlunit source code.
Hrm, here we go. At some point, one of these gurus of incompetence decides that we should internally store a map of HttpClients, keyed by host url. Thusly can clients be reused and state preserved across invocations, for a given site.
Said guru however didn’t actually bother fix the thing that gets stuff out of said map. So while the key is now host + port, the blocks that attempts to retrieve things from the map does not include the port. These days, every url has a port, thusly, much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues.
Apparently, this problem has trickled down to other lost souls who use htmlunit cvs, such as the canoo people, who also have the odd user bleating about cookies being ignored.
So after a few days of pointlessly scrolling around, I find the culprit. It’s at this point that I completely lose it and start laughing hysterically. I can’t quite believe the test I’m looking at.
It’s sad and pitiful that things like this happen. It’s even sadder and even more traumatising that it’s not that rare, and is even more common than not. The collaborative effort of so much incompetence should not happen, it should be a freak accident that only happens very rarely, instead of daily, over and over again.
