Thursday, April 21, 2016

Introducing, Contract 0.0.1

Two years ago, I started asking myself that question "surely, I'm not the first person to have had this problem". I was working on a green field project and was looking for a better way to test the interaction between services that communicate over HTTP. I ended up using a project called Wiremock to replace one of the systems for testing and everything worked quite well. But it wasn't perfect.

A year ago, I found myself in the same position again. This time I stumbled across consumer driven contracts and pact-jvm. We were developing the server at the time and the client was being developed in another department we couldn't dictate their test approach. We build our own contract driven frame work on top of Wiremock and again, it worked quite well. But it wasn't perfect.

I started working on 'Contract' a few months ago. Replacing Wiremock with a embedded tomcat and using the lessons learned from both stalled attempts to build this tool. Contract will provide a contract-server that will respond based on the supplied contracts to a client system and a contract-client that will send requests and validate the responses from a server under development. Combine the two and you've got test symmetry.

After battling with Jenkins for the last 2 days, 'Contract' is now up in maven central. What it currently lacks in features, it makes up for in simplicity.


And now that the basics are in place, its feature time. Watch this spot for more features!!!

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