Introduction
This document explains how to unit test EJBs with Cactus. It is
divided in 2 parts:
EJB unit testing works with Cactus 1.0 or later.
EJB3 unit testing works with Cactus 1.8.1 or later.
General Concepts
Why use Cactus for testing EJBs?
You might be wondering why you would use Cactus to unit test your
EJBs whereas you could use standard JUnit test cases. Indeed,
you could write a standard JUnit test case and view your code as
client side code for the EJB to test ... There are actually a few
reasons to choose Cactus instead:
-
If you are using local interfaces (EJB 2.0), then your beans cannot be called remotely
(i.e. the caller need to be in the same jvm). However, as all Cactus redirectors run on
the server side, you can unit test your local interfaces with Cactus.
-
Very often the production code that will call the EJBs is server
side code (Servlets, JSPs, Tag libs or Filters). This means that if
you run the tests from a standard JUnit test case, your tests will
run in a different execution environment than the production one,
which can lead to different test results,
-
An application using EJBs very often includes a front end part which
is in almost all cases a web application (i.e. using Servlets,
JSP, Tag libs or Filters). It means that you would also need a
framework for unit testing these components. Cactus is providing
a comprehensive and consistent framework for testing all server
side components. This is a compelling enough reason to use it !
-
Cactus provides automated Ant tasks to automatically start your
EJB server, run the tests and stop it, thus automating your
entire test process and making it easy to implement continuous
build and continuous integration of your J2EE project.
The process
You can unit test your EJBs from any of Cactus redirectors:
ServletTestCase, JspTestCase or
FilterTestCase.
This means that you would write a test case class that extends any
of Cactus redirectors, get a home reference to your EJB, create an
instance of it, call the method to test and perform asserts on the
result.
It is that simple ! What is slightly more complex is the deployment
of your EJBs to your EJB container but you should be familiar with
this, right?
J2EE RI Tutorial
This
J2EE RI tutorial
is a step by step guide for writing Cactus EJB unit test for the
Sun J2EE RI server.
