Spock Test Framework

Posted on March 20, 2023by Tharinda Wicky

Spock aims to be a more powerful alternative to the traditional JUnit stack, by leveraging Groovy features which seamlessly integrate with Java

Spock Features Highlights

Highly Expressive
Spock enforces a clear test structure
BDD style test can be expressive through the “given, when and then” blocks
Compatible with all major build tools and continuous integration providers
Inbuilt Mocking and Stubbing
Parameterized test and Data-driven test ( Data table-based and SQL table-based)

JUNIT -> SPOCK -> CUCUMBER
Spock lies between junit and cucumber

At a glance, the Spock framework is,

BDD style testing and specification framework
Which runs Junit under the hood
For Java and Groovy applications
Test case writing in Groovy
All three components combine with a single library
- Unit testing
- Mocking
- BDD

Testing Tips and Tricks

Spring bean creation testing – Feature Toggling

Posted on October 1, 2021by Tharinda Wicky

Spring auto-configuration can be tricky when it comes to conditional based bean creation. The best way to ensure the proper application context is through meticulous testing.

Spring Boot 2.X provides some test helpers for easily configuring an ApplicationContext to simulate auto-configuration test scenarios.

Application Context Runner

Utility design to run an ApplicationContext and provide AssertJ style assertions. The test is best used as a field of a test class,

Let’s try this with a use case,

Feature Toggling

Let’s assume the application consists of multiple features and these features are toggled ( bean creation ) by environment configuration-based conditions,

Feature Definition

All the features of the application are defined as an enum and the enum contains a code and the application configuration itself. For simplicity let’s consider an app with 3 features.

	public enum AppHubFeature {

	LOGISTIC_UNIT_UPDATE("Logistic Unit Update", FeatureConfig.LOGISTIC_UNIT_UPDATE),
	ORDER_STATUS_UPDATE("Order Status Update", FeatureConfig.ORDER_STATUS_UPDATE),
	STOCK_ADJUSTMENT("Stock Adjustment", FeatureConfig.STOCK_ADJUSTMENT);

	public static class FeatureConfig {
	public static final String LOGISTIC_UNIT_UPDATE = "app-hub.feature.logistic-unit-update";
	public static final String ORDER_STATUS_UPDATE = "app-hub.feature.order-line-status-update";
	public static final String STOCK_ADJUSTMENT = "app-hub.feature.stock-adjustment";
	}

	public final String feature;
	public final String config;

	AppHubFeature(String feature, String config) {
	this.feature = feature;
	this.config = config;
	}

	public String config() {
	return this.config;
	}

	public String feature() {
	return this.feature;
	}
	}

view raw AppHubFeature.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Application Dynamics Performance Engineering

Micrometer, Prometheus & Grafana

Posted on August 27, 2021by Tharinda Wicky

This is a monitoring infrastructure building task with some basic matrices. where the metrics are extracted, processed and visualized using the proposed setup to facilitate data-driven decision making.

Specifically, the following metrics were introduced,

Core JVM matrices like CPU, Memory, GC and threads…etc
Monitor any application method execution time

Application Dynamics

Any performance metrics analyzing platform based on following basic steps

Performance Metric extraction
Store Metrics ( Time-series database )
Metrics stat-based visualization and alerting

Tips and Tricks

Log4j2 custom layouts

Posted on June 28, 2021by Tharinda Wicky

Log4j22 provides multiple ways of creating a custom layout for many requirements. This article will explain simple ways to implement custom layouts using log4j2 plugins

In Log4j 2 a plugin is declared by adding a @Plugin annotation to the class declaration. During initialization, the Configuration will invoke the PluginManager to load the built-in Log4j plugins as well as any custom plugins.

Apache logging services

We can use both AbstractStringLayout or LogEventPatternConverter according to our requirements. Both options will provide a way to access log4j LogEvent that has all the relevant details about the log event to be customized.