Datamixer 0.1.88 review

How do you build a web application without data? Suppose it has many pages, including forms and pages for display

License: BSD License File size: 0K Developer: Rick Wood

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How do you build a web application without data? Suppose it has many pages, including forms and pages for display. Until they're developed, users can't enter information. Mock data has to be provided to the application, to test the interaction between screens, business logic, and database.

It may take a good amount of effort to create a mock dataset large and complex enough to mimic real world situations. For example, it is not unusual for an application to be supported by a database schema with hundreds of tables, each with many columns and many foreign key relationships. The database may have millions of rows of data. Datatypes include integer, floating precision, datetime, and string. There are a wide range of values, and they are dependent on each other in ways that must satisfy the business requirements.

Mock data is useful at various points in development. It can be used with an HTTP test client, to simulate the responses a user makes at the front end. It can be inserted directly into the database, to test the database access layer. It can replace the database layer, and be provided directly to the business logic implementation.
It might be nice if the datasets at these different stages come from the same pool, so that their values represent the same underlying model. It would be nice if this model could be constructed once, and then the presentation of the data tailored for the stage at which it's used.

Often a great deal of effort is spent reducing the world's objects into a compact object model. Datamixer goes the other way: it takes a conceptual object model, and explodes it back into a diversity of objects. It tries to make this diversity easy to manage, through configuration and customization. It interacts with data repositories, and is able to mix and merge mock values with real ones. The aim is to make it easy to create the data, so that time can be spent on the data model.

Datamixer does not attempt to analyze a problem domain, in order to generate data that does a better job at testing the domain. It could be driven by a tool that does that kind of analysis.

Installation:

To install, simply unzip or unjar the distribution package to a directory of your choice. A distribution has these directories:

The data directory has files with samples of commonly used data, such as names. It is intended to grow.
The doc directory has documentation.
The examples directory has example Java source and XML configuration scripts. Apache Ant is used to run these examples: type ant build
The lib directory has all jars required by the application.

What's New in This Release:
license changed to BSD.