Features

Last update : September 25 2001

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  • Current scope and status of Cactus

    Scope and Status

    Note Support for testing the View layer is done through integration with HttpUnit. This is functional testing and not unit testing.

    Note EJB unit testing is done by calling the EJB to unit test as you would if you were writing code to call an EJB from a servlet.


    General design features

    • Cactus gives you a very good confidence that your code is going to run fine on the server it will be deployed to (thanks to Cactus in-container approach that executes the test inside the container),
    • Cactus let you test container interactions. This is essential in a world where containers are providing more and more features for their components every day,
    • Cactus let you test and automate the deployment process to your server (using prebuilt powerful custom Ant task),
    • Cactus does not mandate any change to your classes to test, although it helps think about writing better code and do some refactoring,
    • Cactus provides a good middle ground in term of test graininess : too fine-grained tests are hard to write (like mock objects tests that completely simulates the domain objects and focus exclusively on unit testing your logic code) and need complementary tests. Too coarse-grained tests (like functional tests) are not enough to easily uncover bugs and work in a iterative development process where tests are run very often to ensure everything is working

    Detailed feature list


    • Integrates seamlessly with the JUnit testing framework. Any tool that works with JUnit will work with Cactus because a Cactus test is a JUnit test ! See TestCase Howto tutorial for details.
    • Provides a ServletTestCase class that your test case must extends for unit testing Servlets or any java classes that make use of Servlet API objects.
    • Provides a JspTestCase class that your test case must extends for unit testing Taglibs or any java classes that make use of JSP API objects.
    • Provides a FilterTestCase class that your test case must extends for unit testing Filters or any java classes that make use of Filter API objects (Cactus 1.2 only).
    • Extends JUnit by defining two additional (and optional) methods that can be implemented for each test case (i.e. for each testXXX() method) : beginXXX() and endXXX(). See the TestCase Howto tutorial for details.
    • Predefined Ant build scripts that demonstrate how to automate Cactus unit tests (automatically starting your servlet engine, running the tests and stopping your server). There are scripts provided for the following Servlet engines (but it is easy to add new engines) :
      • Tomcat 3.2 (Servlet API 2.2)
      • Tomcat 3.3 (Servlet API 2.2)
      • Tomcat 4.0 (Servlet API 2.3)
      • Resin 1.2 (Servlet API 2.2)
      • Resin 1.3 (Servlet API 2.3)
      • Resin 2.0 (Servlet API 2.2 and 2.3)
      • WebLogic 5.1 (Servlet API 2.2)
      • Orion 1.4 (Servlet API 2.2 and 2.3)
      • Orion 1.5 (Servlet API 2.2 and 2.3)
    • Handles setUp() and tearDown() methods which work the same as for JUnit except that they are run on the server side before and after calling each testXXX() method
    • Tested with all versions of JUnit up to 3.7 included
    • Support for Servlet API 2.2 and 2.3 (Support for Servlet API 2.1 is no longer provided)
    • Works with JDK 1.2 or 1.3 (not tested with 1.4 yet)
    • Wraps some of the standard API objects in order to provide additional methods to help write unit tests. See the TestCase Howto tutorial for details.
    • Transparent Log4j logging (if you don't have Log4j in your classpath no logging is done) for helping debugging problems.
    • HttpUnit integration. See the HttpUnit Howto) tutorial for details (for Cactus 1.2 only). This enables Cactus to provide strong and integrated functional testing features.



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