Tuesday, February 24, 2009

JSFUnit goes GA

I'm very happy to report that the JSFUnit 1.0.0.GA release is now out!

JSFUnit is the only end-to-end BlackBox/WhiteBox testing solution for JSF. Your tests run in-container and out-container at the same time. That is, JSFUnit lets your tests submit real HTTP requests using a headless browser. Then it lets you examine all the artifacts inside the container including the FacesContext, Managed Beans, UIComponent tree, FacesMessages, and much more. And since you are running inside the real container you never need a mock object or stub. You never have to worry about constructing a fake test environment.

Most of you reading this blog have heard all that stuff before, so I'll just talk a bit about the GA release. Here are the main changes from the Beta 3 release.
  • The conversion to HtmlUnit is now complete. The old client side API based on HttpUnit is completely gone. Since HtmlUnit is far better at handling javascript, this means that most JSF AJAX libraries will work right out of the box. The notable exception is ICEfaces, and I've been working with ICEfaces team to get support for that as soon as possible.
  • We now have a JSFUnit deployer for JBoss AS5. I blogged about this earlier. This deployer lets you run your JSFUnit tests without making a single change to your WAR. Click here for details.
  • JSF 2.0 support. I know you are wanting to play around with JSF 2.0, right? Now you don't have to give up test-first development while you explore.
  • The last change is a bit of sad news. The two developers who were working on the JSFUnit static analysis tool have moved on to new jobs where they are no longer using JSF. I versioned the code to 1.0 along with everything else, but I do want everyone to be aware that new features and bug fixes for static analysis won't happen until someone else steps up. If you are interested in taking this on let me know. JSF static analysis is really cool stuff and it's a very useful tool.
Lastly, I want to thank everyone who helped make JSFUnit happen. This is a new kind of tool that required a lot experimentation before we got it right. It has taken much longer to get here than I expected. The community feedback has been great and I've gotten tremendous support internally at JBoss/RedHat. So, in no particular order, thanks to Brian, Dennis, Jason, Matt, Shelly, Julien, Kragoth, Wolfgang, Patrick, Dimitris, Farah, Sacha, Kito, Pete, Ed, Ryan, Alexander, Jesper, Neil, Ken, and a bunch of others I've probably forgotten.

So long, and thanks for all the fish,

Stan