Gasoline: Project Overview

Project Summary

Gasoline is a homemade, multiplatform-first test framework for Kotlin. Its primary goal is to provide a simple, lightweight, and intuitive testing experience, drawing inspiration from established frameworks like JUnit and Kotest but with a focus on minimalism and idiomatic functional Kotlin.

The framework currently supports:

• Test discovery via @Test annotations.
• Test lifecycle management with @BeforeAll, @AfterAll, @BeforeEach, and @AfterEach annotations.
• A fluent assertion library for validating results.
• A basic test runner and reporter that summarizes test outcomes.

Tenets

The development of Gasoline is guided by the following principles:

• Simplicity and Minimalism: The framework should be easy to understand, use, and maintain. It provides essential features without unnecessary complexity.
• Multiplatform by Default: It is designed from the ground up to be compatible with multiple Kotlin platforms (e.g., JVM, Native).
• Idiomatic Kotlin: The framework is written in a way that is natural for Kotlin developers, leveraging language features like annotations and extension functions.
• Convention over Configuration: It relies on sensible defaults and conventions to minimize the amount of configuration required to write and run tests.
• Functional Programming for Testing: It encourages the use of pure functions and immutable data in tests to create predictable, side-effect-free, and maintainable test suites.

Running

To build the application from scratch just do:

nix build --impure

The impure flag is a tech debt of skill issues in nix.

If you want to make development changes on an interactive terminal:

nix develop

This project uses devenv.

Troubleshooting

Assertions never fails

This package uses assertions from kotlin.test, to enable this you need to run the application with the -ea in the JVM options.

Next Steps for Improvement

To enhance the capabilities and usability of Gasoline, the following features and improvements are planned:

• Parameterized Tests: Introduce the ability to run a single test method with multiple sets of input data.
• Test Suites: Implement a mechanism to group multiple test classes together and run them as a single unit.
• Asynchronous Code Support: Add built-in support for testing asynchronous operations, particularly Kotlin Coroutines.
• Mocking Framework: Integrate a simple, lightweight mocking or spying mechanism to help isolate dependencies.
• Advanced Reporting: Enhance the test reporter to generate more detailed output, including timing information, stack traces, and different formats (e.g., XML, HTML).
• Test Filtering: Provide a way to run specific tests based on names, tags, or other criteria.
• Gradle Plugin: Develop a Gradle plugin to simplify test execution and integration into the build process.
• Command-Line Interface (CLI): Create a CLI for running tests outside of an IDE or build tool.
• Expand Assertion Library: Add more matchers for different data types and conditions to the assertion library.
• Official Documentation: Create comprehensive documentation to make the framework easier to adopt and use.