Java Power Tools

Chapter 20. Testing Your User Interfaces

Introduction

Automatically testing user interfaces has always been difficult. Indeed, for many projects, it has often been placed in the “too-hard” basket. In this chapter, we will look at two tools that can help with your automatic Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing: Selenium and Fixtures for Easy Software Testing (FEST). Selenium is an innovative tool that uses a web browser to run tests against your web application. And FEST is an equally innovative product that lets you integrate Swing testing as part of your JUnit or TestNG tests.

Testing Your Web Application with Selenium

Introduction

With a bit of practice and good tools, it isn’t difficult to write good unit tests for a large part of most applications. Lightweight POJO-based frameworks such as Hibernate and Spring make it easier to design classes and components that can be unit-tested in isolation. Embedded Java databases such as Derby and HSQLDB, along with database testing frameworks such as DBUnit, make it a relatively simple task to test database access layers. EJB-based applications are an exception to this rule—you generally need to deploy your EJBs onto an application server before you can test them correctly, which makes unit testing unwieldy and difficult.

However, testing the user interface of a web application has always been problematic. Some libraries, such as StrutsTestCase (see Chapter 13) and the Spring MVC testing framework, make good use of mock objects approach ...