Today I've been working on some elaborate unit tests that require a database and a memcached object. In My Opera, like probably everywhere else, we use our own classes for both DBI and memcached access. The memcached class in particular is just a subclass of Cache::Memcached, so nothing special there.

I was looking at already existing modules that would mock Cache::Memcached without requiring a running memcached server. The only relevant one I could find is Test::Memcached.

However, Test::Memcached interacts with the memcached binary, trying to start/stop it. This is not really what I want to do. I could do that, but it would be slightly complicated because we have lots of test installations, and we'd have to install or require a memcached daemon running everywhere.
A single shared memcached daemon wouldn't be so smart either since the different installations would interfere with each other. We could probably use key namespaces for that. Mmh.

Anyway, I decided that having a mock object, something that could be named Cache::Memcached::Mock, or Test::Memcached::Mock could be simpler and more easily testable as well. So I wrote a prototype that subclasses Test::MockObject that works fine for now and covers all my needs. It uses just a regular hash as memory storage, and supports get(), set(), flush_all(), and delete().

Not sure if I should upload it to CPAN…