HtmlTestingUsingXpath - iDIA Computing

It all started so innocently. I wanted to test-drive the creation of a JSP tag. And I didn't want to create a fragile test that did string comparisons on the output. Remembering Alex Chafee's [http://www.purpletech.com/xpe/ XPath Explorer], and found

Maybe you're using HTTPUnit to unit test your Web site, and you're sick of using the W3C DOM classes to painstakingly walk down your DOM tree. You can use XPath to jump immediately to the value you're looking for and assert that it's present. Using Jaxen, that's as easy as...

    assertXPathEquals("book list should contain title " + expectedTitle,
                 "//td[@class='bookTitle']",
                 expectedTitle,
                 webresponse);

    void assertXPathEquals(String message, String xpath,
       String expected, WebResponse response) throws Exception
    {
        String value = new XPath( xpath ).valueOf( response.getDOM() );
        assertEquals(message, expected, value);
    }

Do you realize how many packages define a class or interface named XPath? The paths of XML remind me of the old Colossal Cave Adventure Game. You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. There are so many XML libraries for java, it took me awhile to track things down. Some of the libaries are in source form, and have to be compiled.