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Re: [jakartaee-tck-dev] [data-dev] New Tools and Challenges of Creating Modern TCK on Persistence Layer
Hello All,

I am hesitant to agree with this direction. 
I've heard many times that Arquillian is old and not "modern" but it's more modern than the Vehicle approach of the current platform TCK.
Additionally, Arquillian has already solved many of the roadblocks in place when writing tests that need to run on a Jakarta EE platform.

I've used TestContainers extensively and here are the roadblocks that Arquillian has solved that we'd have to solve if we decided to switch to TestContainers:
  1. TestContainers doesn't have a standard Interface for application server containers.
    • We would have to create one, and every Jakarta EE platform would need to implement it (similar to how every platform server has an Arquillian implementation).
  2. We would have to create a library similar to ShrinkWrap that would allow us to programmatically create applications and deploy them to the test container.
  3. We would have to create a set of protocol libraries that also get deployed to the test container so that tests only have to be written once but can be tested either using:
    • Core profile: using REST
    • Web profile: using Servlet
  4. We would have to figure out a way to distinguish between tests that need to run on the client system vs. inside the container.
  5. We would have to create a deployment library that can be extended by those running the TCK to allow for one-off customizations to the application before it is deployed.
    • For example, the Concurrency TCK allows vendors to add custom *-ejb-jar.xml files to artifacts before they are deployed.
  6. Finally, all of this would need to be worked both into the Junit5 lifecycle and the TestContainer lifecycle.
I honestly think the work I've done on the Jakarta Data TCK shows how simple using Arquillian can be and I even had to figure out a way to make that TCK run both in a Standalone mode and on different Jakarta EE profiles (core / web).
I don't think it is feasible to make the jump from Vehicles to TestContainers for Jakarta EE 11.
I also worry that using TestContainers will raise the complexity of running the TCK for vendors as opposed to Arquillian.

Thank you,
Kyle Jon Aure

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