What's ApiHug Kola

​Latest

​Summary

Kola is a testing framework and tool, primarily serving the entire Apihug ecosystem, and is still under active development and enhancement (as of 2024/08).

Kola inherits the design principles of ApiHug:

1. Unified language, DSL, and reduced divergence
2. Relying on existing technologies, maximizing the utilization of existing assets
3. Extremely low learning cost
4. Single source of truth, with version control management

​Why

​Existing Challenges

1. Testing often requires either high expertise (programming skills) or is too loosely structured
2. Multiple tool stacks and lack of context switching between different roles
3. Lack of design planning upfront
4. Rigorous version management
5. Native Collaboration

​Existing Concepts

1. TDD: Test Driven Development
2. BDD: Behavior-Driven Development
3. CDC: Consumer Driven Contracts

​So

Among the many testing solutions available, each has its own pros and cons, leading to a lack of overall convenience and completeness in most integrated solutions.

Some deficiencies are difficult to satisfy in the current paradigm, such as enabling all stakeholders (product manager, front-end, back-end, testing, etc.) to understand and write the tests, and providing a centralized and unified testing management.

Within the constrained environment of ApiHug, Kola provides a relatively optimal solution:

1. Follows the BDD naming convention: Given/When/Then/And, intuitive and simple
2. DSL, based on the declarative groovy syntax
3. Strong validation: static checking (groovy) + compilation processing
4. More "sugar", enabling user habit migration: junit, junit5, assertj, jsonpath, rest-assured
5. ApiHug integration
6. IDE support
7. Collaboration

Eventually, on 2024-08-02, the first version of Kola, 1.0.0-RELEASE was released with latest ApiHug SDK bom.

⚠️TBD⚠️

​Next

1. Multipart file support
2. Customized report
3. Debug tool
4. Dependencies import
5. Event driven support
6. Stub side
7. performance test

​Refer

1. spring test spring-framework/spring-test
2. spring test doc spring-framework/reference/testing
3. spring boot test spring-boot-test
4. spring boot test doc spring-boot/testing
5. spring contract spring-cloud-contract
6. spring contract doc spring-cloud-contract reference
7. cucumber Behaviour-Driven Development
8. Spock: Spock Framework
9. karate Test Automation Made Simple
10. Contract Test Martin Fowler
11. PactFlow SmartBear Consumer Driven
12. Contract Testing Vs Integration Testing from PactFlow
13. Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern