Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Using the Jetty Plug-in to Start a Web Application

Functional testing is usually harder than unit testing because functional testing requires a complete execution environment. This requirement is particularly tough to satisfy when you are testing a web application, as you need to start your application in a Servlet container. This lab demonstrates how to use the Jetty plug-in to start the web application from Figure 3-1, in the Jetty Servlet container. We selected Jetty because it is a very fast container and a quality Jetty plug-in is available for Maven.

Note

Jetty takes only a few milliseconds to start up.

How do I do that?

As shown in Figure 3-1, there is an acceptance subproject from which you will execute your acceptance tests (otherwise know as functional tests).

The web project that you used earlier generated the WAR that you wish to test functionally. You need to tell the Jetty plug-in to deploy this WAR. You do this by defining a dependency in the acceptance project's project.xml, and by tagging the dependency with the jetty.bundle property:

<dependency>
  <groupId>mdn</groupId>
  <artifactId>qotd-web</artifactId>
  <version>${pom.currentVersion}</version>
  <properties>
               <jetty.bundle>true</jetty.bundle>
               </properties>
  <type>war</type>
</dependency>

Let's configure the Jetty plug-in so that Jetty runs on port 8081 (by default it runs on 8080). You achieve this by adding the following property in the project.properties file, in the acceptance/ directory:

maven.jetty.port = 8081

Start Jetty ...