After battling some sickness and a little bit of yak shaving, I've finally started work on my grant for smolder.
The first deliverable is to replace the custom XML schema that I used (which was based on the internal representation of a test run used by Test::TAP::Model. I know, I know... this was a really bad thing to do, but so it goes (and yes, Test::TAP::Model has changed their internal representation). I want to replace the XML with straight TAP, but there are a few complications. TAP doesn't currently support multiple files. Each TAP "stream" correlates to one test file and the harness keeps track of the results to show the viewer at the end. Since I want smolder users to upload 1 file per test run I need something to contain them. I could wrap all those TAP streams in some container format (YAML, JSON) but then I'm no better of than the XML route I currently have.
So I've decided that smolder will take a simple archive file (tar/tar.gz initially) which contains the various TAP files. Since we sometimes want metrics like "How long did this test run take" or "What order where these files run in" (since it doesn't have to be alphabetical) then there will also be an optional YAML (or JSON I haven't decided) file in there with this meta information.
So the first step was ripping out all the XML stuff currently in Smolder and it's reliance on Test::TAP::Model and friends. Then to replace it with a TAP parser (using TAP::Parser). This is currently about half way done, and I hope to find the time to finish it this week.
