Recently the java.net Mobility and Embedded Community published a Java Mobility Podcast 81: JDTF, in which Victor D'yakov talks about the community's new Java Device Test Framework Project. Having worked on lots of large (millions of lines of code) software engineering projects, I'm quite familiar with the difficulty of testing systems for robustness and reliability. So, today I decided to take a look at JDTF.

The project's home page introduces JDTF as:

a test framework based on Sun Microsystem's commercial Java Device Test Suite (JDTS) product. JDTF is a general purpose, fully-featured, flexible, and configurable test framework suited to assess various aspects of Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) device implementation quality, such as fitness, interoperability, reliability, and performance. The framework is a set of JT harness plugins that facilitates the running of quality test suites on Java ME devices.

Following the JT harness link brings us to the JT Harness project, which is also a java.net project. The JT harness:

• Is designed to configure, sequence, and run test suites that consist of many (100,000 or more) discrete, independent tests. It is especially good at testing APIs and compilers.
• Can be used to run tests on all of the Java platforms, from the Java Card platform, to the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition ("Java EE").
• Enables you to create test suites that are self-contained products that customers can easily configure and run.

The JT Harness project released their Version 4.2 Milestone Release in March. The JDTF project released Version 2.4 in May. Among the highlighted features in JDTF 2.4 are the capability to generate new stub test classes, integration with NetBeans, ability to run tests on Java ME / CLDC devices, and ability to debug tests on Java Platform Debugger Architecture enabled emulators and devices.

Terrence Barr wrote about the JDTF project when it was released as a Java Mobile and Embedded Community project. The project had a pod at JavaOne, it was presented in lightning talks (at CommunityOne and in a JavaOne BOF), and JDTF was also an aspect of a JavaOne technical session (TS-6263: Device Fitness Testing) and a JavaOne panel discussion (PAN-7083: JATAF Panel: What Is It, How to Use IT).

Speaking of JATAF (the Java Application Terminal Alignment Framework -- another java.net project), JDTF is the test framework that has been chosen by JATAF for running their test suite. JATAF is "collaborative project made up of companies and individuals whose goal is to make Java ME a truly ubiquitous platform for application deployment on mobile devices. Current sponsors are Orange, Sony Ericsson, Sun, and Vodafone." You can hear excerpts from the JavaOne JATAF panel discussion in Java Mobility Podcast 83: JATAF panel discussion.

Clearly, I've barely scratched the surface of the Java Device Test Framework and related technologies in this one post. I'll go into some more depth on the project and related projects in some future follow-on posts.