Re:Survey: Python vs Ruby Test Ecosystems
by cdavid on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @09:29PM
(#1912661)
I don't think it is fair to base your impression on GAE. GAE is a very particular platform.
I am not so familiar with testing for web applications, but nose on python certainly supports test runners, fixtures, etc... I am actually surprised you can get a testing framework without those
GAE is especially hard to test because you essentially run it in an emulator locally. It's also pretty bare-bones, so you don't get the free testing tools you get with Rails, like fixtures (love 'em or hate 'em, at least they can get you started) and a test runner.
Sure, you can set all that stuff up (and I do) but it sucks having to do a bunch of grunt work that's done for you in Rails.
FWIW, my preferred testing setup in Rails is Shoulda with Mocha for mocking and my own fixie library for pre-populating test data (it's faster than factory_girl) and factory_girl if I find I need it. I think acceptance testing with Cucumber is over rated and I'll be damned if I'm going to program in English, so I do not bother.
For GAE, I'm using gaetestbed and writing a lot of helper functions.