Ken's Blog | Unit Testing SMTP Mail

Saturday, 26. February 2005

Unit Testing SMTP Mail02/27/2005 12:13 AM

Wow. Can't believe it's been two weeks since I blogged. Time flies when you're on short term projects. I've been integrating BMC Remedy support into Vaultus' Blackberry/PocketPC App Server for the past few weeks and when I get started on a project, I focus pretty deeply on it.

Found a neat unit testing tool for SMTP mail called Dumbster (an early version was covered in a Javaworld article). It lets you verify that your application sent out an SMTP mail message successfully. Dumbster can be improved a little bit more by providing hooks so you can verify the connection information and can override the body handling. I'll probably make these changes and submit them back to the Dumbster maintainers.

While we're on the subject of unit testing, I still don't know why some companies don't think it should be a required part of development because it's a "waste of time". As part of development, you end up writing test routines for various parts of your application anyways or if someone finds a bug and you write a test routine to reproduce it; you might as well formalize this and use these tests for regression testing. This especially makes sense when your full runtime environment takes 10-15min to do a roundtrip from finding a bug to trying your fix

It also makes sense if you want 3rd parties to help write drivers for your system; they'll need validation tests to make sure their driver is ok. You might as well write a unit test framework to help these 3rd parties out; in the old days, this was called a "validation suite". Guess I'm dating myself now

p.s., for Notes users who've wondered what Notes would have been like if it were designed to store all its fields in a relational database, have a look at Remedy (though it's much less programmable because it uses the equivalent of Notes @functions on forms instead of Lotuscript or Java); it uses a single relational database for all applications. The Remedy Java API is very nicely done though I wish it let you hook in callbacks/filters in Java. It's very disappointing that it has no rich text support. I'm amazed at how many companies buy systems like Remedy just for their HelpDesk application. I'd bet Lotus would have sold boatloads more copies of Notes if they had just included a HelpDesk application as part of their set of included templates/applications.

Comments :

1. Richard Schwartz02/27/2005 12:28:46
Homepage: http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/PowerOfTheSchwartz.nsf

Lotus did ship a help desk-ish app back in the R3 days. It was called CSERVE. It wasn't part of the actual install, as I recall, but in the latter point releases of R3 it was included on a separate diskette (or two or three).

-rich

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