Question

There is a team working on acceptance testing X11 GUI application in our company, and they created a monstrous acceptance testing framework that drives the GUI as well as running scenarios.

The framework is written using Perl 5, and scenario files look more like very complex Perl programs (thousands of lines long with procedural-programming style) than acceptance tests.

I recently learned Ruby’s Cucumber, and generally have been using Ruby for quite a lot of time. But unfortunately I can’t just shove Ruby to replace Perl because the people who are writing all of this don’t know Ruby and it’s quite certain that they wont want “this” kind of interruption.

So to bring Ruby’s Cucumber a bit closer to their work, I rewrote it using Perl 5. Unfortunately I am really not a Perl programmer, and would love to get a code review and to hear suggestions from people who both know Perl and Cucumber.

Hi Perl/Cucumber StackOverflow users – please help me create this “open source” attempt to re-create Cucumber for Perl! I would love to hear your comments and will accept any acceptable help.

The minimal source code is here:

http://github.com/kesor/p5-cucumber

Thank you for your attention.

For those not familiar with cucumber – please take just one small moment to take a look at this one small little page: http://cukes.info/

Answer 1

Can you review my Perl rewrite of
Cucumber?

Answer: Yes.

I’ve read through the github code you posted. It looks pretty good.

I’m curious about the following snippet from Parser::Parser.yp::ERROR. Why did you chose to use “and do {}” over “if( ){ }”? Style? scoping? other?

  exists $parser->YYData->{ERRMSG}
  and do {
    print $parser->YYData->{ERRMSG};
    delete $parser->YYData->{ERRMSG};
    return;
  };

I haven’t used cucumber and am still trying to wrap my head around the usage model. How would someone go about verifying/running your calculator example?

If you plan to release your code to CPAN (and you should), then you’ll want to bundle this git source into an installable tarball. You’ll want to include one of the module installing tools: ExtUtils::MakeMaker, Module::Build, etc. I’ve recently started using Dist::Zilla, and am really happy with it. It got me over the activation energy of releasing my first cpan module.

20 second tour of Dist::Zilla:

1. download and install Dist::Zilla
   and its requirements (there are
   many, as it’s a developer only tool)
2. create a dist.ini file in the top
   level of your package ( ‘dzil new MyPackage’ )
3. run
   ‘dzil test’, ‘dzil build’, and ‘dzil
   release’,to test, (build and test),
   (build, test and release)

See the Dist::Zilla::Tutorial