Stubbed
Cassandra (Scassandra) is an open source test double for Cassandra. Martin Fowler has a
very general
definition of what a test double actually is.
When I refer to a test double I mean stubbing out at the protocol level. So if your application makes calls over HTTP, your test double acts as an HTTP server where you can control the responses, and most importantly: inject faults.
Wiremock is a great example of a test double for HTTP.
I like this kind of stubbing out as it allows me to really test drivers / network issues etc. Deploying to cloud environments where network/servers going down happens more frequently makes this even more important. If you're using a JVM language and all this happens in the same JVM it is also quick.
Why is this release important?
This is an important release for Scassandra as it now supports all types, previously it only supported the subset of CQL that my old employer, BSkyB, used. Now's a good time to mention that this tool was developed completely in my own time and not while working there :)
It still has lots of limitations (no user defined types, no batch statements, no LWT) but as it is designed to test individual classes it is still usable for all your code that doesn't use these features even if they are used some where in your application.
I had previously used it for full integration tests, in that case it had to support your entire schema. I have stopped doing that as I intend to build a different type of Cassandra testing tool for that using
CASSANDRA-6659. This JIRA extracted an interface for handling queries, which I want to use to inject faults/delays etc. If you haven't used Scassandra before it is important to know it doesn't embed a real Cassandra, it just implements there server side of the native protocol and "pretends" to be Cassandra.
Version 0.6.0 has a view of Cassandra 3.0, where embedded collections are likely to be supported. Previously you used an enum to inform Scassnadra what your column types are, or the variables in prepared statements. For example:
Here the
withColumnTypes method on the builder informs Scassandra how to serialise the rows passed into
withRows.
This worked for primitive types e.g Varchar, Text. But what about collections? Sets were supported first so I went with VarcharSet etc, bad idea! What about Maps? That is a lot of combinations, and even worse List<Map<String, Int>>?
An enum was a bad idea, so in 0.6.0 I've introduced the CqlType, this has sub classes for Primitive/Collections and there is a set of static methods and constants to make it nearly as convenient as an enum for the simple types. The advantage of this is I can now embed types inside each other e.g
And then when Cassandra 3.0 comes we can have things like map(TEXT, map(TEXT, TEXT)) for a multi map.
The end goal is actually for you to give your schema to Scassandra and it will just work this out. This is some way off as it requires being able to parse CQL and at the moment Scassandra just pattern matches against your queries.
Happy testing and as always any feature requests/feedback just ping me on twitter
@chbatey