I love this idea of Personal Unit Tests.

It’d be easy enough to fill in a piece of paper each day or remember to fill in the wiki page with my details, but I think I can do better than that (read: that’s too easy and dull, and would get me started sooner).

How my thoughts progressed:

• cron a script (maybe even a GUI with wxPython) to popup at the start of each day and ask about the previous day’s tests from a hard-coded list, taking pass/fail answers and saving them to a wiki similar to how I record my daily work
• cron a jabber bot to send me a data form with pass/fail radio buttons for hard-coded tests and save to a wiki page
• cron a jabber bot to send me a data form with pass/fail radio button for hard-coded tests and save to Google Spreadsheets
• cron a jabber bot to read questions from the first column of a Google Spreadsheet, present them to me using a data form, then save the results back to the spreadsheet

Doesn’t that all sound so much more like Web 3.0?

So let’s look at some practical issues. Data Forms is XEP-0004 – the last time I looked for supporting clients was 2005 and they were thin on the ground.

The important issue back then was that according to the spec <jabber:x:data> stanzas can be sent as a child of either an <iq> stanza or a <message> stanza but only the former was supported in most tools and I needed the latter.

Looking again, apparently Smack now supports this (and so hopefully Spark, the client based on Smack, should do too – this page seems to confirm it) as does Gajim . Exodus has supported this since 0.9.0.35. As far as I remember Psi supported the type in 2005, so I can only hope that two years has been enough to also support data forms.

So it looks like there’s enough client support for this to be feasible. Next post I’ll see about getting some of this running in practice – in the meantime you can play with one of this year’s Summer of Code projects, the Data Form Designer Suite for XMPP.