Thank you for your nice words. We spent a lot of time thinking through the architecture and implementation of OpenTest and it's very rewarding to see that people understand and appreciate the design.
Implementing new keywords (test actions) can be done without creating custom test actors, by creating a new Java class that inherits from the TestAction base class and override its run method. For a simple example, you can take a look at the implementation of the Delay test action. You can then package the new test action in a JAR and drop it (along with any dependencies) in the user-jars subdirectory in your test actor's working directory. The test actor will dynamically load all the JARs it finds in there and will find the new test action class (using reflection) so you can make use of it in your tests. Some useful info and things to look out for:
- Your Java project is going to have to define a dependency on the opentest-base project (which is where the TestAction base class is implemented).
- When you copy the JAR to where your test actor is, make sure to copy any dependency JARs along with it. Please note that a lot of the dependencies that you might need are already included with the core test actor binaries (you can have a look at the POM.xml to see what they are).
- If you happen to have any dependencies that conflict with the other JARs that included with the core test actor binaries, you can apply a technique called shading to "hide" the conflicting classes under a different package name. Most of the times you're not going to need this, but if you do and you get stuck let me know and I'll give you some pointers.
Here's sample project that demonstrates how to build an OpenTest extension that creates a couple of custom keywords: https://github.com/adrianth/opentest-extension-sample
And here's an extensive video tutorial about creating custom OpenTest keywords: https://getopentest.org/tutorials/custom-keywords.html
