Future of Arquillian?

[marks1900]

I have noticed a couple of things about Arquillian, that has me wondering about this project's status and future direction.  Is this project dying or getting replaced by something else - Arquillian 2?  Any feedback would be appreciated.

On the positive:

• The source code repositories do seems to be slightly active - https://github.com/arquillian , though there hasn't been an official release since January ( Index of /maven2/org/jboss/arquillian/arquillian-bom/ - 27 January 2016 ).

On the negative:

• The Arquillian website http://arquillian.org/ seems outdated - The book on the front page "Arquillian IN ACTION" that takes up about half the area and doesn't exist ( Links to http://www.manning.com/sotobueno/ which links to https://www.manning.com/books/testing-java-microservices )
• The Arquillian getting started guides at http://arquillian.org/guides/getting_started/ , shows examples that uses Java 6 and JBoss AS 7 (Very outdated)
  • To directly quote - This guide assumes you have Maven available, either in your command shell or your IDE. If you don’t, please download and install Maven now. You’ll also need JDK 1.5 or higher installed on your machine, though JDK 1.6 is preferred.
• The last post to the Arquillian development group is 7 months old - https://developer.jboss.org/en/arquillian/dev?view=discussions
• The press page seems to have outdated entries (10th July 2014) - http://arquillian.org/invasion/press/

[bmajsak]

Hi,

thanks for sharing your concerns with us. Hearing the community voice like that only gives us more steam to work harder on Arquillian ecosystem.

Rest assured that the project is not going anywhere and in fact there are tons of new things coming, as the core team has grown now.

As for your questions / observations

The source code repositories do seems to be slightly active

In fact, Arquillian Core in 1.x version has been quite stable for quite a while. There are some major changes on the way but overall we are focusing our efforts more on the extensions side than the Core itself at the moment. Arquillian 2.0 is another topic, which we are going to plan in details in the next few monts. That said 1.x will still evolve and we will keep maintaining both when 2.x eventually arrives.

The Arquillian website seems outdated. The book on the front page "Arquillian IN ACTION"

We keep rolling release announcements, but the main content hasn't been changed that much lately, that's correct. We are planning to put in more guides and blog posts, so stay tuned and visit the page from time to time. The book has been lately renamed (or the new name and the focus of the book has been officially announced). I'm working on changing the cover as we speak. We will follow up with the blog post in next few days explaining the change. But it's still gonna be a lot of Arquillian content in it!

The Arquillian getting started guides shows examples that uses Java 6 and JBoss AS 7 (Very outdated)

Well, in fact we still support JDK 5 and 6, as well as older containers, so at least the part about pre-requisites is not really that bad As for the application server, sure we could change it to WF but that would pretty much be only about changing the container adapter, as the samples from the guides, as well as tests themselves won't need to change - that's the very neat feature of Arquillian from my point of view - portable tests without any container-specific details in the code.

However we could make a bit of the revamp here to make it not feel so outdated, thanks for the suggestion. Also, if you would be interested we would be delighted to have some contributions there

The last post to the Arquillian development group is 7 months old

We are considering the transition discuss.arquillian.org, which we actively use for development topics. We might at some point move the whole forum there. For the moment there those two places to watch

The press page seems to have outdated entries (10th July 2014)

Thanks for spotting this! Most of the content on Arquillian website is gathered from all over internet and there might be some problem with the feed we set up for this part. I have opened an issue on GitHub already.

Again many thanks for sharing your invaluable thoughts with us! If you have some other ideas how we can make the website even cooler don't hesitate to share!

Cheers,

Bartosz

[rakcheru]

Its neither my intention to contest your reply nor forecast arquillian future but i doubt if there is any future for the core arquillian in large monolithic applications. Its missing some important features.

Namely:

Choice of skipping Deployment and use already deployed application is a must for any CI setup. At the same time its also is a must for a individual development i.e. ability to use already deployed application as only Test code is being developed.

Going by the history of the enhancement requests towards that, i think it will never be a reality for Arquillian to make @Deployment optional. That effectively rules out Arquillian for any large/legacy applications with not so clean module separation.

Frankly its been a long wait... So much promising yet unusable... Appreciate the efforts though.

Some links to suggest that the development in core arquillian is stopped. Again, absolutely no offence to anyone's hard work in making arquillian what it is today.

Single deployment for all test cases

Single deploy Arquillian

Faster test development with arquillian when testing large ear

Arquillian Core Suite/SubSuite: How to define the Suite - dev - Arquillian

Run Arquillian tests as a suite...

[ARQ-197] Research support for @Deployment on multiple levels - JBoss Issue Tracker

jboss7.x - Single deployment for all test cases in Arquillian - Stack Overflow