JUnit on steroids - JUnit in Action - page 390

testing support, many of these features are provided by more than one tool. Such fea-
ture overlap might sound redundant (the classic NIH 1 syndrome), but this diversity
allows you to choose the most appropriate tool for your needs.

19.1 Introduction

Let's take a brief look at the tools analyzed and how to run this chapter's examples. All
of these tools are open source projects; some are active and mature, and others have
been stalled in development for quite awhile.

19.1.1 Tools overview

Following are descriptions of all tools analyzed in this chapter.

U NITILS
Unitils ( http://unitils.org) is a library that provides plumbing infrastructure for many
types of testing needs, such as database access, mocks usage, and Spring integration.
Although it's a relatively new framework (created at the end of 2006), it's a mature
project and has been designed from the ground up with modern testing concepts in
mind. It's framework agnostic (works with JU nit 3.x, JU nit 4.x, and Test NG ), its fea-
tures are offered as modules (which provides room for extensibility), and it makes
heavy use of Java annotations.

JU NIT - ADDONS
Created in 2002, JU nit-addons is the oldest tool analyzed in this chapter. As the web-
site ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/junit-addons) states, “ JU nit-addons is a collec-
tion of helper classes for JU nit.” Sounds quite simple, and indeed it is. But despite its
simplicity and the fact that its development has pretty much stalled (the last version
was released in 2003!), it's still a useful tool, especially for projects based on JU nit 3.x,
because many of the features it provides are already available on JU nit 4.x.

FEST
FEST ( http://fest.easytesting.org) stands for Fixtures for Easy Software Testing, and as
the name implies, it's another library providing a useful testing infrastructure. Simi-
larly to Unitils, FEST also works with JU nit or Test NG 2 and is based on modules.
Although most of the modules provide functionalities already offered by other tools,
they do it in different ways, which might sound more natural for developers used to
the JM ock style of declarations, more specifically, to the fluent interface style, as
defined at http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FluentInterface.html. But regardless of
these overlapping features, it offers a module ( FEST Swing ) that's quite unique,
because it provides support for GUI testing.

1

Not Invented Here

2

The project was initialized under the name TestNG-Abbot.