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Apache > Jakarta > Cactus | Docs for: v1.6 | v1.5 Last update: May 8 2004 |
ForewordsIf you want to quickly get a feeling of Cactus, there is a 20 minutes tutorial that take you through running your first Cactus test using Tomcat. It doesn't explain how Cactus works or any other details but let's you have something running quickly. We suggest you take this quicky tutorial and then come back here and continue reading below. You would have had a first glimpse of Cactus in action and will be ready to understand the concepts behind it and its full power. Installing CactusThere is not really an installation of Cactus per see, as Cactus is not an application but a framework. However you do need to understand how it integrates in your working environment. Thus, installing Cactus simply means to understand what jars need to be put where and what are the configuration files you need to have and edit. This is discussed below. There are 2 kinds of productivity environments in which you may want to use Cactus, mainly:
Usually, these 2 environments are complementary. A good strategy is
to use an IDE to increase day to day productivity, run quickly the
Cactus tests in the IDE and use Ant to perform the
(continuous) builds (including running the Cactus tests).
System RequirementsIn order to run Cactus tests you need to have the following software already installed on your system:
The Cactus files
At this point, you should have
downloaded a Cactus distribution
(for the J2EE API you intend to use) and unzipped it in a
The jars making up Cactus can be found in
The Cactus configuration files are described in the Configuration Howto tutorial. What's next?At this point you should understand what Cactus is and how it works. The next step is to understand how to set up Cactus in your environment. For this you'll need to understand How to setup Cactus classpaths and start Cactus tests and How to configure Cactus. Then, you should read the TestCase Howto to understand how to write Cactus Test Cases. The last step is probably to put in practice what you've learned so far by running the Cactus Samples. Enjoy ! |