Átila on Code

So I read about Cucumber a while back and was intrigued, but never had time to properly play with it. While writing my MQTT broker, however, I kept getting annoyed at breaking functionality that wasn’t caught by unit tests. The reason being that the internals were fine, the problems I was creating had to do with the actual business of sending packets. But I was busy so I just dealt with it.

A few weeks ago I read a book about BDD with Cucumber and RSpec but for me it was a bit confusing. The reason being that since the step definitions, unit tests and implementation were all written in Ruby, it was hard for me to distinguish which part was what in the whole BDD/TDD concentric cycles. Even then, I went back to that MQTT project and wrote two Cucumber features (it needs a lot more but since it works I stopped there). These were easy enough to get going: essentially the step definitions run the broker in another process, connect to it over TCP and send packets to it, evaluating if the response was the expected one or not. Pretty cool stuff, and it works! It’s what I should have been doing all along.

So then I started thinking about learning BDD (after all, I wrote the features for MQTT afterwards) by using it on a D project. So I investigated how I could call D code from my step definitions. After spending the better part of an afternoon playing with Thrift and binding Ruby to D, I decided that the best way to go about this was to implement the Cucumber wire protocol. That way a server would listen to JSON requests from Cucumber, call D functions and everything would work. Brilliant.

I was in for a surprise though, me who’s used to implementing protocols after reading an RFC or two. Instead of a usual protocol definition all I had to go on was… Cucumber features! How meta. So I’d use Cucumber to know how to implement my Cucumber server. A word to anyone wanting to do this in another language: there’s hardly any documentation on how to implement the wire protocol. Whenever I got lost and/or confused I just looked at the C++ implementation for guidance. It was there that I found a git submodule with all of Cucumber’s features. Basically, you need to implement all of the “core” features first (therefore ensuring that step definitions actually work), and only then do you get to implement the protocol server itself.

So I wanted to be able to write Cucumber step definitions in D so I could learn and apply BDD to my next project. As it turned out, I learned BDD implementing the wire protocol itself. It took a while to get the hang of transitioning from writing a step definition to unit testing but I think I’m there now. There might be a lot more Cucumber in my future. I might also implement the entirety of Cucumber’s features in D as well, I’m not sure yet.

My implementation is here.