Netty in Action

Chapter 9. Unit testing

This chapter covers

• Unit testing
• Overview of EmbeddedChannel
• Testing ChannelHandlers with EmbeddedChannel

ChannelHandlers are the critical elements of a Netty application, so testing them thoroughly should be a standard part of your development process. Best practices dictate that you test not only to prove that your implementation is correct, but also to make it easy to isolate problems that crop up as code is modified. This type of testing is called unit testing.

Although there’s no universal definition of unit testing, most practitioners agree on the fundamentals. The basic idea is to test your code in the smallest possible chunks, isolated as much as possible from other code modules and from runtime dependencies ...