Monday 7 April 2008

WFS Performance Testing

LISAsoft has been contracted to test robustness and conformance of Web Feature Services (WFS) in the Australian Water Data Infrastructure Project (AWDIP).

An Open Source robustness and conformance testing framework will be developed as part of this project. These testing tools will help system integrators and tool developers build quality Spatial Data Infrastructure which is robust and scalable.

What are Community Schemas?

The WFSs deployed in AWDIP use the Community Schema functionality which was recently introduced to the stable 1.6 release of Geoserver.

The GML returned by Web Feature Services (WFS) includes semantically defined geometric data describing points, lines polygons as well as other information, like Water Level or Water Use.

Community Schemas define specific fields and acceptable values for the “Other Information” inside GML. Eg: Within a Community Schema we can define Water Use as: agriculture, irrigation, domestic, … but not farming. Using Community Schemas facilitates sharing data between data stores, and enables powerful business applications like the data analysis provided by AWDIP.

More information at on Community Schemas is available at: https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/twiki/bin/view/Infosrvices/InformationViewpoint

What sort of testing?

Stress, reliability, load, performance, error handling and conformance testing will all be supported. Black Box testing will be used for most of tests, interfacing with the WFS through the Web Service interface.

The tests will be configured using JUnit, allowing it to be incorporated into existing testing and continuous integration frameworks. Project specific tests, as required by AWDIP, will be developed as separate modules.

White box testing will be done for specific AWDIP installs to test internal bottlenecks and database responsiveness.

Who’s involved?

The Australian Bureau of Rural Sciences is responsible for the Australian Water Data Infrastructure Project (AWDIP), and have contracted LISAsoft to build a deployable testing framework for Geoserver deployments.

The testing framework will build upon prior Geoserver/Mapserver testing done by TOPP and others. In particular, we will use Andrea Aime's blue print for performance tests which integrate into Geoserver's continuous testing framework.

Rob Atkinson (CSIRO Australia) has been leading the effort to support data standards in Geoserver and has been involved in the design and deployment of AWDIP WFS nodes, as well as ongoing support for other international data standards such as GeoSciML.

Join the Project

Duckhawk is the Open Source, WFS testing project. Interested parties are invited to join our email list and monitor or participate in the project.