Mint (Mint Interpreter)
See the download page about obtaining this under licence
The current version of Mint is 1.3, dated 1st June 2012.
Mint is a language and a tool for defining and validating grid or web service test scenarios. Although Mint was designed for use with Cress, it can be used independently of this. As Mint is an extension of Mustard, see the Mustard home page for the context of Mint. See the Cress home page for an overview of Cress.
Mint has been used to validate services in the following domains:
Mint validates implementations using:
Mint creates and runs tests expressed using the Mustard scenario notation. It relies on the cress_common.pm Perl module borrowed from Cress.
To run Mint requires Perl 5 or similar and the Sun Java Development Kit 1.5 or later. Mint has been run on Windows (XP and 7, under CygWin), but should also run on various versions of Unix.
A Unix-like installation is assumed in the following, though it should be possible to install and run on other platforms where Perl and Java run. It is assumed that the files are extracted to $HOME/bin/mint.
In a few places in the code, a Unix-like environment is assumed. For example, Macintosh end-of-line may not be correctly handled. Paths and filenames are assumed to have '/' separators. Search paths are assumed to have ':' separators. On a Windows system, it is suggested that CygWin be used; ActivePerl may be suitable but has not been tried.
The following environment variables should be set up (e.g. in your .profile, .cshrc or Windows XP environment variables):
| Variable | Meaning |
|---|---|
| JAVA_HOME (used by java and javac) | JDK installation directory |
| PATH (used by command-line) | a directory path used by a shell to locate executables, e.g. to include $HOME/bin/mint/bin |
| PERLLIB (used by Perl) | a directory path used by Perl to locate modules (cress_*.pm), e.g. $HOME/bin/cress/bin. |
This script takes a filename on the command line. "file[.mustard]" should contain a Mustard test file. The main file can optionally be followed by feature or service names to restrict testing to these. A partner "feature" has the form <service>.<partner>.
Using a ws vocabulary option is usually preferable as gs invokes the Globus version of WSDL2Java. The latter sometimes does not translate WSDL correctly as it is based on an older version of Axis.
Note that Mint relies on an environment (test files) having been set up by Mustard, so it may not be sensible to run Mint directly. Also note that testing a partner on its own will not work if it relies on faults defined only by the partner service.
Command-line options are:
| Option | Meaning |
|---|---|
| -e level | use the given error reporting level (3 - panics, 2 - these plus errors, 1 (default) - these plus notes, 0 - these plus diagnostics) |
| -h | help on parameters |
| -j | suppress WSDL translation to Java (translated by default) |
| -k key | key for server authorisation (user:password@host) used as the default for 'target.url' in a service properties file; if the host is given, it replaces the one in this file |
| -p mode[runs] | performance mode (c concurrent, s sequential), optionally followed by the number of runs (default 20) |
| -r directory | root directory for main service (default current directory) |
| -t properties | a comma-separated list of target properties in the format partner[@file[.properties]] |
| -v vocabulary | use the named vocabulary (gs, ws - always used for main service file) |
| service [partner...] | service and optional partners (test all by default) |
See the Mustard description for information about literal values.
See the Mustard description for information about notation.
See the Mustard description for examples.
This is not open-source software. The authors (Koon Leai Larry Tan and Kenneth J. Turner, University of Stirling) retain copyright in it. Nonetheless, the authors will normally approve its use by others subject to the following conditions:
first public version
updated for use with Cress 3.4 and Mustard 1.8
small technical improvements and reformatting
the DS (Device Service) and SS (Statistics Service) domains are now supported
the -k option has been added to define a server authorisation key for BPEL
the -r option has been added to define the diagram path when file checking is in use (=file-expected/file-contents)
file checking is now supported for test values of the form =file_name/file_content
variables are now optional in expressions such as ?Type
Up one level to Lotos Utilities