Unit Testing GNUstep Programs

As a Java developer who has been trained in test-driven development, I would like to have something similar to Junit for GNUstep/Objective-C. Evidently, around 2005 Apple added a unit testing framework to Xcode 2.1 called OCUnit. OCUnit was not something created by Apple, but they chose to make it the defacto standard by including it in their packages. Unfortunately, this essentially killed off two other competing frameworks, UnitKit and ObjcUnit.

UnitKit is stuck at 1.1 and evidently no longer supported. The GNUStep port is still available from the etoile web site.

http://cvs.gna.org/viewcvs/etoile/Etoile/Frameworks/UnitKit/
http://cvs.gna.org/viewcvs/etoile/Etoile/Services/Developer/UnitTests/

The GNUstep port of ObjcUnit, stuck where is was back in 2002 (v. 1.2) is at:

http://gentoo-portage.com/gnustep-libs/objcunit

Since Apple is distributing OCUnit and the other two are now unsupported, it would at first seem to make sense to try using OCUnit. It is available at...
http://www.sente.ch/software/ocunit/

Unfortunately, although it does support GNUstep, evidently it works only on Mac OS X. Bad news for GNUstep on Linux.

So, we are stuck with using one of the two older, unsupported frameworks or simply doing unit testing with no framework.

Before the creation of Junit it was quite common to test a Java class simply by putting test code in the main method since each class can have a main method. That begs the question, how many main methods can we have in an Objective-C application? Is there one per class or one per application? The answer is one per application, because Objective-C is an extension of C, and there is one and only one main function in any C program (same goes for C++).

I remember in my days as a C++ programmer, I knew people who did unit testing by creating a bunch of Unix shell scripts that called their program in different ways. However, most people didn't even do that. Back then unit tests were usually just a documented list of steps that had to be carried out manually along with expected results. Essentially, you ran the program and if it works without noticeable problems then it passes.

The first unit testing framework that all the others are based on was SUnit by Kent Beck in his 1998 Guide to Better Smalltalk. So, of course, nobody was using these frameworks before then, which makes one wonder if it's really all that important. It has been my experience that most of the time developers don't do true "test first" development in the context of "extreme programming" principles. They write their JUnits after the fact and often only because they are required to by management. Also, unit testing frameworks are pretty good for testing back-end code, but not so much for testing the GUI part of an application.

Don't get me wrong. I like test driven development. However, all things taken into account, I'm not sure I want to spend time writing a bunch of unit tests for a GNUstep program if I can't use OCUnit and there are other ways to get around the testing problem without the need for a testing framework. That's especially true for a program which is only a prototype.