Otherwise, I agree with you. A freely available manual would be preferable over a book.

Maybe you have a look at Rick Muckgridge’s ZiBreve demo, another FIT/FitLibrary IDE (as replacement for FitNesse). It currently supports Java and .NET.
http://www.zibreve.com/

Especially if you have complex setup scenarios and want to have readable specifications (”user stories”), have a look at FitLibrary. It makes it a lot easier for a developer to write fixtures and leads to very readable test code IMHO.

I should have been more clear that I only looked at the Java implementation of Fit so the various ports may be much better in terms of helpful source code / examples. Or maybe the Java implementation is a port and I should have been looking at the original implementation. Not sure about that. I’ve been working on a Groovy port of the ideas in Fit (with the working name of Grit lol).

I and three other developers spent a few days looking at examples and documentation we could find on the web for Fit, FitNess, and FitLibrary. I was just a bit annoyed that I needed to get a book to find any reasonable examples.

We have a somewhat complex fixture setup and I want a way to be able to express the huge number of processing scenarios in such a way that people would be able to read the fixture and understand the intent of the test. I’m under NDA but think of trying to functionally test a pricing engine for airplane flights. There are a huge number of factors that go into the pricing of an airplane flight for a customer and trying to test that by encoding the tests within jUnits would basic limit the understanding of the tests to developers only.

I don’t really have a problem with how Fit/FitNess works per se it was the total lack of support for a team trying to get spun up that drives me (more) nuts.

But on the other hand, you have an official books with a detailed description and real examples. In addition, it amazes me that every now and then you see people in the newsgroups that don’t even read the FIT or FitNesse documentation that is
available on the internet.

HTML usage: Well, it is the least common denominator for tabular data. And I always prefer a textual format over Excel spreadsheets that are also supported (at least by some language ports). In addition, I avoid writing my tests in HTML by using FitNesse and its compact Wiki table syntax (that I prefer over WYSIWYG).

Examples: Have you looked at the FitNesse acceptance testsuite, HuntTheWumpus example (on FitNesse), or the FitLibrary tests and examples?

Some final questions at last:
- Do you have another, a better functional-/acceptance-test framework that allows to describe your tests in executable stories?
- Have you looked at FitLibrary at all? It takes away much pain of cell parsing/processing when writing fixtures (but you should still understand the concepts of the classical FIT fixtures: ColumnFixture, RowFixture and ActionFixture)?

A final note: When you need functional tests, you have other test frameworks that may better suite your needs. But if you want/need tests that can also be understood by a non-developer and that show how you can use a system (client-server), FIT (+ writing tests in FitNesse) is currently my best choice.