Spinach -- With Extras

[Jeff Nyman]

Greetings all. Before I do too much work on a fork of Spinach, I wanted to see if anyone else was doing likewise so as there is not too much duplication of effort.

My goal is mainly to have a version of Spinach that does not remove certain choices from people. I understand why Spinach limits the choices it makes available based on how the developers see things like tables and placeholders as anti-patterns. I happen to disagree but I respect the opinion. My concern is that I have seen those elements (particularly tables) work too well in too many organizations, particularly those with banking, clinical trials, ad serving, and insurance. Those are the environments I tend to work in and that I think a very structured tool like Spinach could do well in.

I also understand the concern about regular expressions. That said, I think placeholder concepts, like that used by the tool Turnip, can certainly mitigate that, particularly in environments that are heavily algorithmic like I mentioned above. Whole classes of clinical trials or banking scenarios can (and I would argue) should be matched with steps that are parameterized.

So my goal is, at minimum, to create a Spinach version with the same structural attributes that it has over Cucumber, but with the addition of supporting tables and (at the very least) placeholders.

What I want to do is see if anyone has started on a similar path such that it either makes sense to join efforts or, at the very least, compare notes.

[Rodrigo Alvarez]

So my goal is, at minimum, to create a Spinach version with the same structural attributes that it has over Cucumber, but with the addition of supporting tables and (at the very least) placeholders.

How different would that be from Turnip? (I'm not sure if it supports tables)

Cheers,
Rodrigo.