The history of JTiger

JTiger is a test framework, developed by Tony Morris in 2004 and published March 23, 2005.

Defining attributes

JTiger had a rich set of features and predefined assertions:

an integrated test assertion for serializability

an integrated test assertion for serializability


check for expected Exception

check for expected Exception


check for equals/hashCode contract

check for equals/hashCode contract


It was easy to run tests programmatically or from an Apache Ant task.

History

Tony Morris developed Assertion Extensions for JUnit (at that time known as JUnitX; not to be confused with other frameworks sharing the same name) a while ago. It contained advanced assertions to be used with plain old JUnit. When Java SE 5 was in beta, he started with the development of JTiger. Because of his contract as an employee of IBM, he needed permission by IBM to publish it as Open Source, even though he developed it in his free time. That process took several months. JTiger even crossed the desk of Erich Gamma, who commented on it in a private email to Tony Morris.

While JTiger was in this approval process, TestNG has been released. At that time it had less fancy assertions (see examples above), but the concept was just as good and additional assertions have been introduced later. Also there were IDE-Plugins for Intellij Idea and Eclipse.

After JTiger has been approved by IBM and released, it gained a fair amount of community acceptance. Independent comparisons with JUnit and TestNG were rather positive, such as Justin Lee’s Test Framework Comparison.

In December 2005 I officially took charge of the project and Tony Morris retired from it. I never changed much except for the documentation and website, though.

Early in 2010 the transfer of the domain ownership for jtiger.org to me failed. I don’t know what went wrong. I got the correct release code from Tony Morris and gave it to my registrar. A few days later my registrar informed me that either the current registrar or the owner (Tony Morris) did not approve the transfer. That was the end of the website.

What now?

In 2008, Tony Morris released Reductio. Similar to QuickCheck, it uses Automated Specification-based Testing. Reductio has become part of the Functional Java API.

And of course you can still use JTiger:


JTiger tar.gz

jtiger-2.1.0376.tar.gz

JTiger MD5 tar.gz

jtiger-2.1.0376.tar.gz.MD5


JTiger zip

jtiger-2.1.0376.zip


JTiger MD5 zip

jtiger-2.1.0376.zip.MD5

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