Category: servlet

When unit testing is not enough

June 19, 2008 by pbielicki

I'd like to share my experiences about unit testing (using JUnit) Java servlets outside of the servlet container. Agile world tells us that we should automate as much tests as we can - it would be good if all aspects of the developed system are completely tested. We should test functional as well as non-functional requirements of our systems. But can all tests be automated? What is the REAL value of such tests? The reality brings us problems and pitfalls even experienced developers fall into. I will present such story regarding automated and manual testing of Java servlets.

The problem
Quite recently I had do develop some "proxy" servlets facilitating Ajax request from web browser to our middleware layer. We couldn't directly send Ajax requests because JavaScript security model doesn't allow to request data from other address than it was originally downloaded (similar restriction to Java Applet).

All right then, our servlets were not doing any amazing job (some input and output transformations were needed, however) but I made some bugs even having 100% test code coverage (used Cobertura 1.9).