Getting Started With Spring’s MVC Test Framework - Part 1

Newly promoted to the main Spring framework is the Spring MVC Test Framework, which the Guys at Spring claim is a “first class JUnit support for testing client and server side Spring MVC code through a fluent API”¹. In this and my next blog, I’m going to take a look at Spring’s MVC Test Framework and apply it to some of my existing sample code to figure out whether or not it does what it says on the tin.

The API has been designed with two ways of setting up server side tests. These are firstly, with a Spring context file and secondly, programmatically without a context file. The Guys at Spring refer to the programatic method as ‘standalone’ mode.

Setting tests up programmatically

Why You Should Write Unit Tests - Testing Techniques 8

I’ve had lots of reaction to my recent blog on ‘What you Should Test’, some agreeing with me for varying reasons and others thinking that I’m totally dangerous for suggesting that certain classes may not need unit tests. Having dealt with What to test, today’s blog deals with Why you should write unit tests, and today’s example code is based upon a true story: only names, dates and facts have been changed.

Unit Testing Using Mocks - Testing Techniques 5

My last blog was the fourth in a series of blogs on approaches to testing code, demonstrating how to create a unit test that isolates the object under test using a stub object. Today’s blog looks at what is sometimes regarded as an opposing technique: unit testing with mock objects. Again, I’m using my simple scenario of retrieving an address from a database:

… and testing the AddressService¹ class:

Why Use PowerMock to Mock Private Methods?

So far I’ve written a couple of blogs on PowerMock covering some of what I think are its most useful features. Today’s blog takes a look at PowerMock’s ability to mock private methods. At first this struck me as a pretty useless idea. The PowerMock documentation says that you can use it to mock private methods that are called many times during your build process so that you only test them once. My first reaction was does it matter whether or not you execute a piece of code once or a thousand times during a set of unit tests? Usually the answer will be ‘no’ and this feature will be pretty superfluous. However, there is a scenario where is come come in very handy...

Using PowerMock to Mock Constructors

In my opinion, one of the main benefits of dependency injection is that you can inject mock and/or stub objects into your code in order to improve testability, increase test coverage and write better and more meaningful tests. There are those times, however, when you come across some legacy code that doesn’t use dependency injection and held together by composition rather than aggregation.

Using PowerMock to Mock Static Methods

In a recent blog, I tried to highlight the benefits of using dependency injection and expressing the idea that one of the main benefits of this technique is that it allows you to test your code more easily by providing a high degree of isolation between classes, and coming to the conclusion that lots of good tests equals good code. But, what happens when you don’t have dependency injection and you’re using a third party library that contains classes of a certain vintage that contains static methods?