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An Early Look at JUnit 4
An anonymous reader writes "Elliotte Harold, proclaimed 'obsessive code tester', took an early look at JUnit4 and shows how to best utilize the framework in your own projects. Many feel that this is one of the most important third-party Java libraries ever developed. It promises to simplify testing by exploiting Java 5's annotation feature to identify tests rather than relying on subclassing, reflection, and naming conventions."
For those who haven't heard of him, Elliotte Rusty Harold is a big name in the Java world - he maintains a very popular blog/news site and has written a slew of excellent books.
He's also a committer on the open source Jaxen XPath engine; my static analysis utility PMD is among the many satisfied Jaxen customers.
The Army reading list
A famous rapper named 50 Cent has a click/gang/group called G-unit. They often say "G-G-G-G-G-G-UNIT" in their songs so people can recognize who they are. Saying "J-J-J-J-J-J-UNIT" is just a play off of this.
Looks like JUnit4 is adopting most of its ideas from TestNG. This is good, as JUnit feels highly constrained and somewhat crippled compared to TestNG, but why even bother with JUnit4? TestNG can run JUnit tests unaltered, so backwards compatibility isn't really an issue.
Unless JUnit is going to add quite a few more features, it still won't be nearly as flexible as TestNG. I think the JUnit developers are stuck on this idea of independent tests, which certainly has its merits but ends up excluding a lot of powerful options or forcing you to use ugly workarounds.
TestNG is more of an all-purpose testing framework, equally adept at unit testing as well as higher level functional testing. As a developer, I want to be able to test things in whatever way fits the task at hand. For instance, sometimes it's easier or arguably makes more sense to test a multi-step process (say, user registration and verification) in a defined order. This is possible with JUnit, but it definitely goes against the grain of the framework, which does not support test dependencies and therefore doesn't support ordered tests. I don't appreciate being penalized by a framework because its developers have a very specific concept of "pure" unit testing.
Perhaps I should elaborate: I'm sure the JUnit developers know far more about unit testing that I do, but I want to write more than just unit tests. I'm perfectly happy to admit to writing functional and acceptance tests (and even tests that talk to a real database) in addition to true, pure unit tests. I understand why the differences should be recognized, but the fact remains that JUnit simply does not accomodate a broader view of testing.
I hate to be critical of something that's brought so much improvement to how we write code (JUnit), but I think we've all learned a lot about unit and other types of testing and it's time to move on to something that embodies those lessons.