The birth of the open source enterprise stack [LWN.net]

The birth of the open source enterprise stack

Posted Jun 30, 2006 6:43 UTC (Fri) by oak (guest, #2786)
In reply to: The birth of the open source enterprise stack by nix
Parent article: The birth of the open source enterprise stack

> One of my least finest hours was a day in 1999 when I broke the
> transaction management in a (large!) financial application by typoing
> in a hook and making all rollbacks throughout that application into
> commits instead. Nobody noticed for *six months*, until a major
> stockmarket feed went down.

This seems an important functionality which should have had a test case
(preferably written before the functionality was fully implemented)
which tests both conditions where rollbacks should happen and where not.

How easy it's to write test-cases for LAMP (and particularly PHP)
software? Is there some test-suite that could be used? I would think
the end user UI tests (needing to use "HTTP API") to be particularly
onerous, but at least LAMP would be good for storing and visualizing
the test results. ;-)

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The birth of the open source enterprise stack

Posted Jun 30, 2006 17:06 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes, it should have had a testcase. Alas the environment in question had such an insane build system that I hadn't at the time written a testsuite framework for it. (I wrote one immediately after this, ahem, incident: I only need my face rubbing in the bleeding obvious *once* ;) )

There are several test frameworks for webbish stuff: Cactus (part of Apache Jakarta) is half of what's needed. I don't have much experience with any of them (due to violent allergies to HTML and webbish stuff in general).