Bionic Buffalo Tech Note #112: Introduction to the Faroe Islands Test Tools
Bionic Buffalo Tech Note #112
Introduction to the Faroe Islands Test Tools
last revised Wednesday 2004.12.01
©2004 Bionic Buffalo Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Tatanka and TOAD are trademarks of Bionic Buffalo Corporation
Introduction
The Faroe Islands Test Tools are a collection of programs to assist in the testing of distributed,
networked applications and systems. The Tools are intended to ease the development and use of test
and verification operations where individual tests involve more than one computer or user, where test
data is gathered from more that one computer or user, and where test software at various network
locations must be controlled centrally.
The Tools include these components:
a test support subroutine library to incorporate into applications
a test manager application to deploy, coordinate, and monitor running tests
utilities to collate and report accumulated test data
Although applications may be run without incorporating the test support library, the library's API
provides easy mechanisms to provide hooks which meet the conventions of the Faroe Islands Test
Tools. An existing, unmodified standalone application usually may be tested or run with limited
options, however.
The Tools are designed using CORBA. However, applications being tested need not be CORBA
compliant. If an application is CORBA compliant, then it may use IIOP to communicate with the Faroe
Islands objects. Otherwise, it may employ text based interfaces based on pipes, files, buffers, and
command lines.
Test environments may vary widely. The Tools are provided in source code form for adaptation to a
wide variety of systems. The Tools are free, and licensed under the FSF General Public License (GPL).
Typical Uses
Typical uses for the Faroe Islands Test Tools include the following:
Network protocol development – the Tools can be installed on multiple network nodes to monitor
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