[news.eclipse.tools.hyades] Re: Hyades VS STAF

["Harm Sluiman" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike, I believe you are bang on when you characterize STAF as a runtime
framework.
It also provides a set of services to help with function testing among other
things.
STAF also has rich capabilities in remote processing  and reporting as well.

STAX provides a very good way to write scripts for STAF to execute, and is
somewhat
tuned to test case writing. To the point of surfacing certain language
constructs such as loops,
blocks and signals.

So where STAF could be an execution runtime that Hyades triggered and
monitored, STAX
has a match to our model of a test case and it's collaboration with it's
environment (including
other test cases).

In some early work we did in IBM before Hyades was formed, we actually wrote
an
import/export of STAX that interacted with an early version of the Hyades
test model. We
intended to hook STAF to log back through our Hyades like infrastructure,
but did not get
that far. However it was very feasible, and we did discuss doing such
integration with the
STAF/STAX developer.

In Hyades we are trying to promote and leverage existing standards, or
defacto standards
before introducing any new ones. Hence our focus on TTCN-3, JUnit as
execution environments,
and UML for the language constructs and the UML test profile for the test
artifacts.
Finally, Hyades also defines the common structures execution histories and
other artifacts have so
reporting utilities can be common as well.

BTW, for clarity the IBM Remote Agent Controller, lovingly known as the RAC
is a
communications layer and application launch and monitoring framework, not an
execution
environment itself. In fact we used the RAC to launch STAF.

Martin, I hope this answers your question.


"Mike Norman" <mgn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:b3fkkt$d0g$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Martin
>
> The way I think of this (I'm preparing to be flamed here!) is that STAF is
> a runtime framework that could sit under Hyades. You could build
> Hyades-compliant tests and then generate code for which STAF/STAX was the
> execution environment.
>
> There are several of these execution environments out there.  There's
> another one called the RAC from IBM which is bundled with some existing
> IBM products.  We (Scapa Technologies)have one, Rational has at least one,
> and there are TTCN3-based runtime environments available from Telelogic
> and Fokus.
>
> There will be some form of free runtime execution framework provided
> inside Hyades.  Whether this will be derived from STAF/STAX or from
> another code base remains to be seen.  However, the interoperability point
> is at the Hyades model level (defined in UML and persisted in EMF), so
> Hyades-compliant tests should be  neutral over execution environments,
> which may vary on things like platform coverage, efficiency and
> fault-tolerance.  The last two are interesting because they are
> diametrically opposite.  For long-running monitoring-oriented test you
> need fault-tolerance in the execution environment.  For load tests the
> fault tolerance introduces overheads which limit scalability.  For this
> reason alone, there won't be a one-size fits all execution environment.
>
> Mike Norman,
> Hyades Project Lead
>
>
> martin wrote:
>
> > What are the main differences between Hyades and
> > STAF(http://staf.sourceforge.net)?
>
> > Are they not two simalar tools?
>
> > Martin Courtemanche
>
>
>
>