Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Anteater with Jelly

Jeff Turner just released a new version of Anteater which integrates with Jelly. It's interesting to see things moving so fast, especially after the recent discussion related to XML-based scripting languages.

Anteater is a testing framework for HTTP and SOAP applications, built as an extension of Ant. The way you write scripts is by using a declarative syntax, where you specify actions to be taken and a set of expected output(s). You can check the output in various ways, including string equality, regular expressions or XPath expressions.

In addition to emulating an HTTP or SOAP client, Anteater can also be used to emulate the server side, in order to test an HTTP or SOAP client application, or to test asynchronous Web services. Anteater embeds a full blown servlet container (Tomcat 3.3), which is used to receive incoming HTTP requests. You can apply the same checks as described above not only on the response received, but also on an incoming request. With this functionality, Anteater can be used to implement test scripts for asynchronous Web services, including ebXML and BizTalk. Anteater can also be used to quickly test Web applications by deploying them on its internal servlet container, making testing such applications a real breeze.

If you're familiar with Ant for writing build scripts, you should be able to grasp Anteater very easily. And since is based on Ant, Anteater is extensible, you can define new tasks and matchers that fit your needs very easily. Check out Anteater's user manual for more information on what it is and how it works.