In-Container testing with JUnit

Given the usefulness and success of a Test Driven Development(TDD) approach for developing (Java based) web applications, it is imperative that a developer chooses a good testing framework for writing unit tests. One such popular open-source test case framework is JUnit.

With JUnit 4.x, developer's can annotations to develop unit test cases. Annotations simplify the construction of test cases to a great extent leaving the developer to focus on writing the essential pieces of the testing logic. In an earlier post that included some test cases, I used the annotation @Test that took care of marking the method as a JUnit test case to be executed by the Test Runner. Thus, all that I needed to write was the assertion for testing the method. A short tutorial on learning the essential JUnit annotations is given here while a more detailed learner guide is available here and an excellent cheat sheat can be downloaded here.

While JUnit is basically a unit testing framework for stand alone Java applications, testing web applications is an entirely different cup of tea. Web applications run within an application server (such as JBOSS), while JUnit executes its test cases in a local JVM. Then how do you test thosein-containerMock Object based approach and the second is to use another testing framework that directly performs in-container testing.

For a Struts based web application, the MockObject approach can be implemented using StrutsTestCase class. Apart from the StrutsTestCase, there are several other available frameworks such as EasyMock that allow you to easily mock up objects. It should be noted that the Mock Object approach is not the same as in-container testing of components.

In-container testing can be carried out using one of the testing frameworks that extend JUnit and enable end-2-end testing of the web application. Cactus, HttpUnit and HtmlUnit are three such testing frameworks. It should be noted that Cactus and Http/HtmlUnit provide different facets to testing the server components. While Cactus focuses on testing server objects in the J2EE spec such as Servlets, EJBs and JSPs, Http/HtmlUnit frameworks emulate the browser behaviour. In other words these frameworks help you test the rendered view after an Http Request. The good news is that these frameworks can be integrated and working together can provide excellent test coverage.

For more reading on unit testing Struts based applications with these testing frameworks, check out this excellent book chapter.

Banishing the Vundo Trojan

If your browsers have started playing up and are opening up new tabs whenever you Google something and these new tabs in turn are redirecting themselves to random sites that you in your normal sense would never visit then chances are high that you are a host to the Vundo Trojan. While the infection appears to stem from a vulnerability in Java 1.5.0_7, I found the infection on a system that was running a much more advanced version (of Java) and so it is highly probable that a new loophole is being exploited.

On the infected machine, Vundo was able to infect and control the behaviour of Firefox, IE and Chrome. An annoying symptom of the infection was random popups and new windows that redirected themselves to mad-search.com(?) and forcibly tried to install AntiVirus 360 (what's that??) on the machine. The key diagnostic tool that was able to catch these infections was PC Tool's SpyDoctor but since the FREE version only performed a scan and required a paid version for the removal, I tried MalwareByte's Anti Malware version 1.31. This tool successfully located and removed the infections. So if you are facing the same problem, head down to MalwareByte and try out the tool but be aware that the tool only locates and fixes existing infections. To guard against getting infected, keep your SpyDoctor's IntelliGuard setting ON.