bdd - What are the differences between JBehave and Cucumber?

Question

I have read somewhere that JBehave is actually the Java equivalent of Cucumber, whereas Cucumber is based on Ruby.

Can someone describe the differences between them provide links that do?

Answer 1

JBehave and Cucumber are completely different frameworks, although meant for the same purpose: acceptance tests. They are based around stories (JBehave) or features (Cucumber). A feature is a collection of stories, expressed from the point of view of a specific project stakeholder. In your tests, you are referring to the stories, typically via regular expression matching.

JBehave is a pure Java framework whereas Cucumber is based on Ruby. Both are very mature frameworks. You can use Cucumber from Java via the Cuke4Duke Maven plugin from Maven, but there is still a language mismatch as it continues to use Ruby internally and you will need to install this language and its infrastructure (so-called 'gems') on the machine that runs your tests. This can be brittle and the language mismatch complicates both debugging and impedes performance of your tests. There is now a pure Java implementation of Cucumber which is called Cucumber-JVM. As of December 2011, it's not released yet, but perfectly usable (edit: version 1.0.0 was released on March 27th, 2012). This new framework is very similar to JBehave as both have native JUnit support.

The following is a comparison of Cucumber-JVM and JBehave.

Similarities:

• JUnit support out of the box
• Pure Java
• Fast
• Easy to use

Pros/Cons of JBehave:

• Pro Very good documentation
• Pro Pretty good HTML formatting of test results
• Con Only supports stories, not features

Pros/Cons of Cucumber-JVM:

• Pro Supports features
• Con Doesn't support parallel JUnit tests. Will however work with parallel Maven 3 builds.
• Con Lacking documentation
• Con No pretty HTML formatting of test results, other than JUnit's own formatting (edit: Cucumber-JVM now does support HTML output)

If you are on a Java project, I would recommend either JBehave (if you are looking for great documentation) or Cucumber-JVM (if the support of features instead or stories is important to you).

I tried both frameworks and went for for Cucumber-JVM.