More TestVisor Development

Firstly...

Git

I'd like to point out that Git is pretty darn good.

I picked GitHub for the hosting because I liked the look of it and had heard ravings about Git; This is probably one of the best decisions I made for this project.

I've only had extended contact with Mercurial and Subversion in the past and I can definitely appreciate the difference in target markets:

Git is targeted toward people who value a holistic view of their environment; It's a more toolbox than black box. Mercurial(or Hg), is more of a nice extensible black box with a good set of buttons on the top.

Any software dev team should really be familiar with at least one of these tools.

IKVM

IKVM seems like a magical piece of software. It's basically a JVM running on CLI/.NET, and it works!

I had a problem - I'm developing in mono, but I was lusting after Mozilla Rhino, a nice Javascript engine written in Java. After a quick look around, I didn't really find anything that worked as well for my platform, so I went ahead and downloaded Rhino. One call to "ikvmc", and my problem seems well and truly solved! I got a Rhino.dll that I can link into my mono project with the worst of the hassle being that I had to also include /usr/lib/ikvm/IKVM.OpenJDK.Core.dll (to use of some jvm types like java.lang.Class), which took around a minute to locate and reference.

I've gotta say, it felt weird typing this into a C# project:

return Context.javaToJS(new java.lang.Boolean(func(testParams, testKey)), s1);

TestVisor

It's been an exciting few days for this project. I'm still on holiday, so I've been tinkering with it pretty much nonstop.

I'm hopefully getting some help with the work from a University chum before long.

Here's a little demo of Javascript test plans:

(On GitHub)

TestVisor passes its first test

TestVisor

I've been working away on this little project for a while as an exercise in coding something useful in my free time.

The end result will be an ajaxilicious virtual machine hypervisor manager which will be able to run sequences of tests on a virtual machine instance,

making use of snapshotting to deal with real world automated testing in a state-controlled way.

It's a long way off done, but here's a taster:

Here we see it initializing some stuff, powering up a Windows 7 Virtualbox instance, downloading a test, executing the test and uploading the results.

My holiday started today and I've been hacking away on this since the morning, I'm quite pleased with what I've got so far. I've been poking this on and off for a few weeks now, but there's truly no substitute for 'the zone' which I finally managed to get into with this.

I was also pleased to find that I could compile a mono executable on the host linux machine I'm developing on and download it to the Windows 7 VM to run under CLR with 0 problems.

It's on GitHub, but not in an amazing state currently. Largely stubs, test code, commented out test code and some hints of where it's going.

Exciting to finally get another project underway, I can't even remember what my last one was...