Testing with Unitils

30 Aug 2008

I was doing some reading and came across Unitils (1.1 was just released).

Unitils is an open source library aimed at making unit testing easy and maintainable. Unitils builds further on existing libraries like DBUnit and EasyMock and integrates with JUnit and TestNG .

Unitils provides general asserion utilities, support for database testing, support for testing with mock objects and offers integration with Spring , Hibernate and the Java Persistence API (JPA). It has been designed to offer these services to unit tests in a very configurable and loosely coupled way. As a result, services can be added and extended very easily.

What particularly caught my attention was the support they’ve included for transactional test cases. By transactional, I mean test cases that will automatically cleanup after themselves. Simply include a @Transactional and you’re rocking.

In the past, we’ve rolled this capability ourselves with varying degrees of success. It’s easy to support rolling back of inserts but somewhat difficult to handle rolling back of deletes and other data mutations.

I’m just in the process of kicking off some new product development (actually, we’re one week into it but who’s counting) and general infrastructure (testing included) is something forefront on our minds.

For starters, we’ve got Cobertura and Selenium integrated into our build. General unit is covered with TestNG with Seam components integration tested using SeamTest/Embedded JBoss. Everything short of the Selenium tests are hitting freshly initialized in-memory databases.

It might be worth considering something like Unitils at this stage rather than building out our own tooling to accomplish much the same thing.