Last for tonight I promise... I (well, and a bunch of people
much smarter than myself) figure the best way to make sure that
implementations are interoperable is to develop a comprehensive test
suite from the specification. Accordingly I've been looking at the
various options and having written the earlier reference implementation
in Python (for Google App Engine) I figure PyUnit is as good a
candidate as ever. It helps that virtually all systems have python
either preinstalled or at least available for download nowadays and
that there's a Google App Engine harness for it (
gaeunit.py).
This should allow anyone (including end users) to point it at their
implementations and test compliance without having to download
anything. I say "should" because I'm not sure if GAE supports custom
HTTP methods yet (e.g. PUT, OPTIONS and more obscure ones like COPY and
MOVE), but I'll soon find out.
Before I spend too much more time looking into this I wanted to
give you all an opportunity to comment, particularly if you have better
ideas? Do any of you think this (and test suites in general) are a
particularly good or bad idea?