Santosh Benjamin

DNUG - FIT, NMock and Python

In yesterdays DNUG meeting we discussed FIT, NMock and Python. Ian Cooper presented FIT, Nick Hines did NMock and Stephen Turner spoke on Python. 20 or so out of 25 who signed up actually turned up which is pretty good.

FIT : I finally understood what FIT is all about. At first impression I thought it was just a means of letting customers provide test data which i reckoned could be done by rustling up a Windows/Web Form and writing the test data to an XML File which could then be read by the NUnit Harness. So i struggled to understand how it was different from NUnit but then Ian explained that we dont need to write the parsers that run over the word/html documents. The Word/HTML is also more free-form and will save us developers a lot of work. Looks like it will take some time and practice for me to more fully understand and leverage the benefits of this.

As Hitesh Khatri pointed out, the whole premise of this is that your customer cares. If all they want is the finished product and only care about a set of screens where they can click buttons, then all this is of no use (except to us developers, that is).

NMock: Excellent presentation. For a long time (some months ago) I couldnt get my head round Mock Objects and some folk here sent me some good links. At the office Steve Meyfroidt (our chief Software Architect) gave a good presentation using some examples in Java and i got to understand some more. Now Nick Hines gave the ultimate explanation worth its weight in gold. I wish this presentation was done a year ago!! I could have saved myself so much grief in my TDD attempts.

Python: Looks cool but i couldnt help thinking "So what?". I guess different languages are just sutable for different things and lend themselves more easily to specific kinds of programming challenges. My question regarding Python is - What is it that I can do in Python that i cant do in C#?  Python isnt OO (from what I gathered, although everything is an object) which may or may not be good depending on your view of the software world. One thing Python has going for itself is that PLONE is a really powerful CMS written in Python so this language must be good for something eh? :-) Its also interesting that MS is working hard on IronPython. Can someone please enlighten me why I might need to learn this language?

Speaking of 'new' languages, what about Ruby? Whats that good for?