[CMake] HowTo make another Dart client like CMake's ctest?

Matt England mengland at mengland.net
Tue Feb 21 14:45:34 EST 2006


(I'm cross-posting this note to both the Dart and CMake mailing lists.  I 
hope that's ok.)

How can I make my software become another Dart client similar to CMake's ctest?

http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Testing_With_CTest
http://public.kitware.com/Dart


Details:

Is the Dart XML client-to-server "interface specification" documented 
somewhere?  Is there a library/module I can integrate in my stuff to do 
this, easily or not?  And...how easy will this be to make?  Can anyone, 
possibly from the CMake/ctest team, provide any pointers?

I'm going to take a look at CMake's 'ctest' utility for my project's 
test-reporting purposes.  However, I'm considering having said software be 
able to (as an "embedded" module or the like) speak "Dart" directly so any 
client I want can instantly report info back to a Dart server (even for 
product software released in the field if we so desire).  If I/we do this, 
I'll no doubt be referencing ctest's source code for this; and if it's not 
already done, we'll probably look to make said capability a reusable 
module/library for this in the future.

Alas, don't look for any Java modules out of my project in the near 
term.  We as of yet don't have any Java-based requirements or 
components.  We are mostly a C++ based shop, but in a very-cross-platform 
sort of way (currently include mingw, debian, rhel/centos, and expanding to 
macosx, freebsd, and others later).

Also: we may be using ctest "straight up" for now if we need to get our 
tests running right away.  Alas, I have yet to thoroughly investigate ctest.

After a discussion I had with Dan Blezec this morning, I suspect that a 
move like the one above may be the kind of thing that was long-term 
envisioned by the Dart-system designers.  I understand that the Dart server 
is a passive mechanism that simply listens for specific XML-based input 
(over an XML-RPC network "channel") that can quite flexibility receive any 
and all sort of info via this channel, so long as the info is properly 
formatted...and I want to submit these properly-formatted test reports to 
my Dart server natively from my project's applications.

This is exactly the sort of "test-data" repository server I had envisioned 
to set up with my distributed test system (for my project's software), and 
I was struggling to determine how to quickly quickly build a subsystem to 
support this.  A Dart server and ctest-like "embedded" seems to solve this 
problem easily, and I'm quite thankful for this work done by the Dart and 
CMake teams.

-Matt 



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