December 2018 Monthly Update

By Rachel Magruder

January 16, 2019

Clojurists Together News

Hello all!

Thanks again to those who participated in our Q1 2019 survey, we greatly value your feedback.

Project applications for our Q1 2019 round close on 15th Jan, midnight PST. The selections will be announced shortly afterwards. The Q1 2019 projects will start on February 1.

Datascript update

The most noticeable thing that happened in December so far is an implementation of or/or-join/not/not-join predicates in Datascript datalog and accompanying 0.17.1 release. The original ticket for this request was opened back in 2015, so it was about time that got fixed. It was also highly requested and probably one of the last things that was lacking in Datascript from Datomic API. Well, now it’s there, feel free to use it. I also added/merged support for idents expansion, and the ability to call transaction fns through idents directly.

I’m pacing my work unevenly, so nothing much happened in DataScript in second half of December. I started experimenting with persistence API and best datastructures for that, but that’s about it. Most of the action will be happening in January.

Kaocha Update

Kaocha-cljs saw it’s first official release last week! This is a major milestone in Kaocha’s mission to be a universally applicable test tool. So far it’s tested with Nodejs and using a browser REPL as the backend, although in theory any environment that can provide a ClojureScript REPL can be used to execute the actual tests.

The general coordinating and reporting of the test run still happens on the Clojure side, as with other Kaocha test types, so that you can use your existing Kaocha reporters and plugins and use them with ClojureScript.

kaocha-cloverage has been split out of the main kaocha artifact and into its own project, which received two bugfix releases these past two weeks.

Kaocha itself also saw three new releases with a combination of bugfixes, supporting code for the ClojureScript test type, and improvements. A small but nice touch is that an equality assertion with only one value is now considered a failure.

I find it’s quite easy to get your parentheses wrong and write something like this, which trivially passes.

(is (= :this-doesnt-test-anything) (keyword "this-doesnt-test-anything"))

This is similar to the existing feature where a test without assertions is considered a failure.

(deftest keyword-test
  (= :this-doesnt-test-anything (keyword "this-doesnt-test-anything")))

Kaocha-cucumber saw two releases with a combination of bug fixes and ergonomic improvements.

The test identifiers are now based on the feature and scenario names, rather than on line numbers.
In case of failures or when using the documentation reporter it’s more clear which feature/scenario executed.
Cucumber tags on features are converted to metadata so they can be used for filtering.
Loaded step definitions are cached, so in case of watch or repl use you get a nice speedup.

Finally Kaocha-junit-xml saw two smaller releases, one to address a compatibility issue with Kaocha-cucumber.

The big thing for this period has been the first release of Boot integration for Kaocha. With that addition the three major Clojure tools (Leiningen, Boot, Clojure CLI) are all supported.

For the main part this works identically to Kaocha on Leiningen or Clojure CLI, accepting the same command line arguments and tests.edn configuration, and producing the same output.

One difference is that command line options that are added by plugins can’t be used directly, due to constrains posed by Boot’s deftask. To work around this kaocha-boot accepts a new --options flag which takes an EDN map of additional options.

Kaocha now also includes a TAP (test anything protocol) reporter function. This was requested early on, and should make Kaocha usable in a greater number of CI/automation scenarios.

The junit.xml output has been improved (again), to provide clearer failure messages.

Kaocha-cljs now captures the exception type and message on the JavaScript side, so these can be accurately reported by Kaocha’s (Clojure/JVM-based) reporter functions, or plugins like kaocha-junit-xml.

A few smaller improvements have been added to Kaocha. The --help output no longer assumes you are using Clojure CLI. The --print-invocations plugin’s output has been tidied up by not adding a redundant --config-file tests.edn, an issue with incorrect file/line reporting on Java9+ has been addressed, and an extra --print-env option has been added to the kaocha.plugin.alpha/info plugin, which prints out the Clojure and Java/JVM version in use.