Blogging Roller

I've been investigating web application testing tools, both for unit testing of web components such as Struts Actions and for functional testing. I read about JUnit extensions Cactus and HttpUnit in Hightower and Lesieki's book Java Tools for Extreme Programming. I learned about StrutsTestCase and JUnitDoclet from Matt Raible's gold-mine of example Ant code: the AppFuse project. That was enough to get me started.

I put together a simple test app with Cactus and StrutsTestCase and was pleased to find how easy it is to invoke Cactus from an Ant script and have Cactus start Jetty, run my tests within the Jetty, and shutdown Jetty when the tests complete. Cactus is going to make it really easy for us to unit test our Servlets, Filters, JSP pages, and Struts Actions. Cactus uses HttpUnit and HttpUnit makes it easy to make sense out of the responses that come back from the web layer, see the HttpUnit cookbook page for an example if this. I wish I had done this a long time ago, how did I live without this stuff!

So, I'm all set for unit testing. Now I need to figure out what to do for functional testing. HttpUnit, MaxQ, and Canoo look promising. I found the bewilderingly long list of functional testing tools at opensourcetesting.org. What open source or commercial tools have you used for functional testing of web applications?

I finally submitted the last of my chapter edits this week for the Apress JSP book. Now I have my evenings back and can get back to the kids, to clearing a giant Netflix queue, cleaning out the garage, and to working on Roller.