Gwen – A Gherkin DSL Interpreter

One platform for many types of automation.

Gherkin is a language for describing software behavior. Any software behavior. It makes sense to use it for evaluating software behavior too. But how can one evaluate any software behavior against any system with the one language?

A common language interpreter with an abstracted evaluation engine could be one way to do it.

This interpreter would accept Gherkin features as input and produce executing instructions as output. Specialised engines with specifically prescribed DSLs could be built and mixed in. The interpreter would support sequential or parallel execution. It would also produce evaluation reports and have a REPL console. It would provide all the necessary processing and tooling required to interpret Gherkin features and execute them. A public library of engines would emerge and be shared for everyone to download and use. The one interpreter would work with all of them.

It’s a simple idea that a colleague and I have been working on. We wrote it in Scala and open sourced it as a project called gwen.

• https://github.com/gwen-interpreter/gwen

Check it out and have a play. We have released several stable versions of our web engine here: https://github.com/gwen-interpreter/gwen-web/releases