Gherkin for Vala

I've had some spare time recently to work on some pet projects and get them into a decent enough shape that they could be subjected to the withering gaze of the Panopticon. One in particular is a port of the Gherkin language to Vala. So what is Gherkin exactly and why should you care?

From the Gherkin wiki:

Gherkin is the language that Cucumber understands. It is a Business Readable, Domain Specific Language that lets you describe software’s behaviour without detailing how that behaviour is implemented.

Gherkin is available for a host of languages and is tightly integrated into JUnit for example. Its syntax is pretty straightforward and designed to be intelligible by non-technical people:

  Feature: Some terse yet descriptive text of what is desired
  Textual description of the business value of this feature
  Business rules that govern the scope of the feature
   Any additional information that will make the feature easier to understand

   Scenario: Some determinable business situation
     Given some precondition
       And some other precondition
      When some action by the actor
       And some other action
       And yet another action
      Then some testable outcome is achieved
       And something else we can check happens too

   Scenario: A different situation
       ...

The Gherkin parser for Vala, which you can get here reads in Feature files and builds a tree of elements that can then either be manipulated directly or output as JSON.

The parser by itself is not tremendously useful, but is one of the building blocks for a comprehensive testing framework for Vala and by extension, GObject that I am presently scoping. If this is something you're interested in, and I assume it is since you've read this far, then I'd encourage you to join the conversation.