Question

This may sound like a vague question but I am looking for some specif pointers.

Our J2EE app is built on Struts2 + Plain Servlets + JSP + iBatis + Oracle

I would prefer to write unit tests in Scala so that I can learn the language on the side as well

• What would I need to be able to verify that a spcific column is displayed in the JSP following some specific steps
  • Click on a link. select some parameters and submit the page to the servlet
  • Verify that the next page has a specific column inside its <table> tag.
• What would I need to create mock requests for the serlvet?

I am trying to write tests like above in addition to core business functionality tests however, the problem is that I am trying to wrap legacy code in unit tests and the code of course is not designed for unit testing.

Answer 1

I wouldn’t call this unit testing. As you are trying to test integration of several units. Also it’s rather hard to create a unit test for a JSP becuase it has many context dependencies available only when you are in the container.

Instead I would advice writing some automated functional tests that are executed against running (deployed) application.

Frameworks like Selenium may be of great help here as they allow to simulate real user behaviour and make asserts against produced HTML code.

EDIT: Another approach here may be to:

• start an embedded servlet container like Jetty within your test code
• deploy all your plain servlets and JSPs to that
• replace Oracle database with in-memory database like HSQL or Derby
• populate it with some test data using DBUnit
• and then again use either Selenium (which has Java binding) or HttpUnit to make requests and asserts against generated HTML code.

But again it will not be a unit test, but rather an integration test.