I'm working on a validator using the simple framework, and I did some code to test it without needing workunits at all. You provide the input files via the command line, and it runs compare_results on all combinations between them.

To show the results of the validation process, it creates an HTML file with a table. Maybe I went too far with that... This is what the output file looks like. Note I'm currently testing it and overwriting that file, so it may be broken when you load it.

I'll post the sourcecode of my stand-alone validator frontend when it's done.