What is the best way to test clients of different programming languages with a server?

Question

We have written clients in different programming languages (Java, .NET/Silverlight, Flash, Javascript) that communicate with a server, as our target is to support various technologies on client side. The functionality they are supposed to perform is the same.

One of the main challenges we are having now is finding a simple and effective approach for testing this variety of client technologies against the server. Currently we use maven, hooked with many maven plugins such as JSTestDriver, Flexmojo, NPanday and others which we have developed by our own to do this. Is there any better approach?

Any help would be appreciated, whether it is recommendation for available frameworks/tools or innovative ideas to do this.

Thanks

Answer 1

What you need is a clean design, otherwise everything is a mess and you have to test everything together.

Your server should have an interface with other systems (Browsers, desktop applications, mobile apps) and then test thoroughly this API. You can do that by using the appropriate framework, depending on technology used for the server. This should be your main test effort and then try to keep API stable, so that for every new version of the server you just run a regression test.

Meanwhile you can test the client applications alone by creating a mock server that uses the same API.

Last one would be your integration test where you run a live version of your server and your client application and you run integration tests.