OGC has recently released to production version 5.5 of TEAM Engine on the OGC Validator. TEAM Engine is the open source software product used for validating compliance to OGC Standards. The production release of this software follows a period of more than 8 months of Beta testing during which the geospatial community thoroughly tested TEAM Engine and shaped it with their feedback.
Key improvements in this release of TEAM Engine include:
- Enhancements to the REST API, including improvements to the access control mechanism
- Improvements to the user interface and report generation facility
- Improvements to error handling
- Addition of Form Validation for Executable Test Suites
- Updated and improved documentation
Anyone looking to test a product for compliance to OGC Standards can do so, for free, using the hosted OGC Validator. Those implementers looking to run TEAM Engine locally can access the source code on GitHub and either install the software locally or run the software through Docker.
Implementers are encouraged to submit their products for certification once they have confirmed that their products pass the compliance tests. Prices for certification can be found on the Compliance section of the OGC website.
What’s underneath the hood?
TEAM Engine is built as a Java web application that runs on Apache Tomcat. The modules containing compliance tests are referred to as Executable Test Suites (ETS), to distinguish them from the Abstract Test Suites (ATS) that are found in the associated Standards documents. An ETS encodes the executable code that implements the testing method specified in an ATS.
Newer compliance tests in TEAM Engine are implemented using the TestNG framework, whereas older compliance tests were implemented using the Compliance Test Language (CTL). TestNG is one of the most popular automated testing frameworks available. CTL is an XML grammar for documenting and scripting test suites for verifying compliance to a specification. TEAM Engine 5.5 supports both TestNG and CTL.
What’s next for TEAM Engine?
Now that TEAM Engine v5.5 has been released, multiple outreach events are planned to support the geospatial community with the deployment and use of this new release. The following have been confirmed and several more are in planning:
- TEAM Engine session at the 2023 Open Standards and Open Source Software Code Sprint, April 25-27, 2023. Register on the Code Sprint website.
- Compliance Interoperability & Testing Evaluation (CITE) session at the 126th OGC Member Meeting in Huntsville, Alabama, June 5-9, 2023.
If you have any questions regarding TEAM Engine or the OGC Validator, please contact the OGC Compliance Program.