Factory Girl is a handy framework in rails for easily creating instances of models for testing.
From the Factory Girl home page:
factory_girl allows you to quickly define prototypes for each of your models and ask for instances with properties that are important to the test at hand.
An example (also from the home page):
Factory.sequence :email do |n|
"somebody#{n}@example.com"
end
# Let's define a factory for the User model. The class name is guessed from the
# factory name.
Factory.define :user do |f|
# These properties are set statically, and are evaluated when the factory is
# defined.
f.first_name 'John'
f.last_name 'Doe'
f.admin false
# This property is set "lazily." The block will be called whenever an
# instance is generated, and the return value of the block is used as the
# value for the attribute.
f.email { Factory.next(:email) }
end
if I need a user a can just call
test_user = Factory(:user, :admin => true)
which will yield a user with all the properties specified in the factory prototype, except for the admin property which I have specified explicitly. Also note that the email factory method will yield a different email each time it is called.
I'm thinking it should be pretty easy to implement something similar for Java, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
P.S: I know about both JMock and EasyMoc, however I am not talking about a mocking framework here.