You can get some information :
Fake objects actually have working implementations, but usually take some shortcut which makes them not suitable for production
Stubs provide canned answers to calls made during the test, usually not responding at all to anything outside what's programmed in for the test. Stubs may also record information about calls, such as an email gateway stub that remembers the messages it 'sent', or maybe only how many messages it 'sent'.
Mocks are what we are talking about here: objects pre-programmed with expectations which form a specification of the calls they are expected to receive.
Fake: We acquire or build a very lightweight implementation of the same functionality as provided by a component that the SUT depends on and instruct the SUT to use it instead of the real.
Stub : This implementation is configured to respond to calls from the SUT with the values (or exceptions) that will exercise the Untested Code (see Production Bugs on page X) within the SUT. A key indication for using a Test Stub is having Untested Code caused by the inability to control the indirect inputs of the SUT
Mock Object that implements the same interface as an object on which the SUT (System Under Test) depends. We can use a Mock Object as an observation point when we need to do Behavior Verification to avoid having an Untested Requirement (see Production Bugs on page X) caused by an inability to observe side-effects of invoking methods on the SUT.
Personally
I try to simplify by using : Mock and Stub. I use Mock when it's an object that returns a value that is set to the tested class. I use Stub to mimic an Interface or Abstract class to be tested. In fact, it doesn't really matter what you call it, they are all classes that aren't used in production, and are used as utility classes for testing.
The difference relies in how the symbol is converted into its respective column type in query language.
with MySQL :string is mapped to VARCHAR(255)
:string | VARCHAR | :limit => 1 to 255 (default = 255)
:text | TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, or LONGTEXT2 | :limit => 1 to 4294967296 (default = 65536)
Reference:
https://hub.packtpub.com/working-rails-activerecord-migrations-models-scaffolding-and-database-completion/
When should each be used?
As a general rule of thumb, use :string
for short text input (username, email, password, titles, etc.) and use :text
for longer expected input such as descriptions, comment content, etc.
Best Answer
You could think of a mock (or double) as a fake object. When you're testing and need to work with an object that isn't easily usable inside your test, you could use a mock as an approximation for how you expect that object to behave and work around it. Stubs can be used in a similar manner but on an individual method on an object.
Here's a rather contrived example of using a lot of both:
You can imagine that using a lot of mocks or stubbing is a bad idea; this is basically masking out parts of your code in your test but, it's an easy solution for some difficult/rare testing scenarios.
Factory Girl is useful for generating data for tests. You would use factories as recipes for creating instances for your models, you might need to test something involving a lot of test data and this would be a situation where using fixtures won't work and creating complicated objects explicitly can be tedious.