crnickl was released yesterday April 30, 2013.
It comes with a small improvement to the API and addresses a problem with unit tests under Java 7
API improvement
The Database interface declares a new method named makeSurrogate to
turn a string into a Surrogate. The string is typically produced by a surrogate's toString method. It was previously not possible to create a surrogate from such a string without making some assumptions and using low-level methods.
Issue with JUnit and Java 7
JUnit tests written with JUnit are usually short pieces of code which can be run independently of each other. However, when writing test cases for a database system, it is often handy to assume that test methods are executed in a predictable order, for example in source code order. Under this assumption, a first series of test methods populates the database, followed by a series of methods which modifies the data, and finally a series of methods which deletes the data.
Making this assumption was fine until upgrading to Java 7. The new implementation of the reflection API differs from its predecessors in such a way that JUnit now executes test methods in seemingly random order. This wreaks havoc when the order of tests is important.
To address this issue the @FixMethodOrder annotation has been introduced in JUnit 4.11. It can be used to force execution of test methods in alphabetical order.
Version 1.1.0 of crnickl-test uses this new annotation and renames some methods so that source order and alphabetical order agree. crnickl-test is a library providing common tests for all database drivers and is used by crnickl-jdbc and crnickl-mongodb.
The software can be found on GitHub and in Maven Central.
