Decoupling JUnit and Hamcrest
Evolution of Hamcrest and JUnit has been complicated by the dependencies between the two projects. If they can be decoupled, both projects can move forward with less coordination required between the development teams. To that end, we've come up with a plan to allow JUnit to break its dependency on Hamcrest.
We've created a new library, hamcrest-junit , that contains a copy of the JUnit code that uses Hamcrest. The classes have been repackaged into org.hamcrest.junit so that the library can be added to existing projects without breaking any code and projects can migrate to the new library at their own pace. The Assert.assertThat function has been copied into the class org.hamcrest.junit.MatcherAssert and Assume.assumeThat to org.hamcrest.junit.MatcherAssume. The ExpectedException and ErrorCollector classes have been copied from package org.junit.rules to package org.hamcrest.junit.
The classes in hamcrest-junit only pass strings to JUnit. For example, the assumeThat function does not use the constructor of the AssumptionFailedException that takes a Matcher but generates the description of the matcher as a String and uses that to create the exception instead. This will allow JUnit to deprecate and eventually remove any code that depends on types defined by Hamcrest, finally decoupling the two projects.
Version 1.0.0.0-RC1 of the hamcrest-junit library has been published to Maven Central (groupId: org.hamcrest, artifactId: hamcrest-junit, version: 1.0.0.0-RC1). The source is on GitHub at https://github.com/hamcrest/hamcrest-junit.
Feedback about the library, about how easy it is to transition code from using JUnit's classes to using hamcrest-junit and suggestions for improvement are most welcome. Discussion can happen on the hamcrest mailing list or the project's issue tracker on GitHub.