No More Updates to ReportNG

Posted in Java by Dan on December 3rd, 2015

About 8 years ago I made the decision to use TestNG for unit testing a Java project at work because it offered a much neater approach to the problem than JUnit 3.x. The only problem was that the HTML reports it generated were ugly. So I quickly hacked together a plug-in using Apache Velocity that would present the information in a way that I preferred and called it ReportNG. There was nothing elegant about the solution and the reports were functional but not particularly attractive, but it scratched an itch. It seemed to be an itch that irritated a lot of other developers because it attracted probably more users than any other, better written code that I’ve open-sourced before or since. I have made no substantial changes to it in years but there are still people using it.

I don’t do nearly as much Java as I used to and where I do I am either not using ReportNG or it is sufficient as it is. For these reasons, and because it ought to be replaced by something better (which probably already exists somewhere – I haven’t looked), I wanted to make it explicit to people still relying on it that there will be no further updates to ReportNG. You have three options:

  1. Continue using version 1.1.4 and accept that it will never get any better.
  2. Fork it on GitHub and make whatever changes you like. The Apache licence is permissive enough to allow most things.
  3. Stop using ReportNG and find something better.