What are the differences among PloneTestCase, plone.testing and plone.app.testing packages?

Question

What are the differences among PloneTestCase, plone.testing and plone.app.testing packages?

By the way, is PloneTestCase not recommended for testing new Plone 4 products?

Answer 1

PloneTestCase is an older product. It's still used by many packages, but it is more cumbersome, more error prone, and less well documented than plone.testing and plone.app.testing.

plone.testing and plone.app.testing are complementary. The former implements low-level primitives that are not dependent on Plone-the-CMS for managing test layers and testing Zope applications. The latter provides the glue to set up a Plone site in an integration test.

If you read the plone.app.testing docs, you should get everything you need.

Answer 2

plone.app.testing contains the parts that are specific to Plone package development; plone.testing is generic and can be used independently of Plone. plone.app.testing builds on top of plone.testing.

Both packages are the new generation of test support libraries. PloneTestCase is the older generation.

In particular, the layers support is much improved in plone.testing.