I'm planning, within the next couple of weeks or so, to release a new version of TAPx::Parser. Amongst other things, I have two test harnesses now included with it (one is a subclass of the other which allows test output to be colorized). Along with this, I have a runtests utility, similar to prove. Here's the start of the docs for runtests:

NAME

runtests - Run tests through a TAPx harness.

USAGE

  runtests [options] [files or directories]

OPTIONS

Boolean options

  -v,  --verbose     Print all test lines.
  -l,  --lib         Add 'lib' to the path for your tests.
  -b,  --blib        Add 'blib/lib' to the path for your tests.
  -s,  --shuffle     Run the tests in random order.
  -c,  --color       Color test output.  See TAPx::Harness::Color.
  -f,  --failures    Only show failed tests.
  -m,  --merge       Merge STDERR and STDOUT
  -r,  --recurse     Recursively descend into directories.

Options which take arguments

  -h,  --harness     Define test harness to use.  See TAPx::Harness.
[download]

Note that the colored test output and 'show only failures' are two features people have long wanted but are relatively tricky to implement due to the current architecture of Test::Harness. Some of the features I'm planning:

• Show which tests unexpectedly succeeded.
• Include a --directives switch which only displays test lines with directives attached (handy for generating TODO lists).
• exec: tell the harness how to output TAP for a given file.

The exec feature might be one of the most important. With that, anything can be tested. For example, imagine the following Perl program we'll call test_html:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Test::HTML::Lint tests => 1;

my $file = shift;
open my $fh, '<', $file 
  or die "Cannot open ($file) for reading: $!";
my $html = do { local $/; <$fh> };

html_ok( $html, "$file has valid HTML" );
[download]

With the above, you could do this:

  runtests --recurse --exec 'test_html %s' www/

Congratulations! You've just converted all of your HTML documents into tests. Or, at least that's the intention :)

What else would you like to see in a new test framework for Perl? People have told me they need XML generated (I can't think of a way to do this generically, though I have the pieces in place to make it easy to write), GUIs, and emailing test failures. What would you like?