Make your tests excellent with Unitils

I am going to share my experience in using Unitils - framework that makes life easier. I have started to work with this framework from early release candidates and can't imagine my tests without it now. If you need to test application that use Hibernate, Spring, other ways of database access, but you don't want to write much test code and create some homegrown frameworks, then Unitils is your choice. If you already use some specific testing frameworks like EasyMock or DbUnit, but your tests are hard to create and maintain then Unitils will remove this pain for you.

Unitils started as a discussion group on unit testing. The result of these discussions is the list of guidelines that will be useful without Unitils itself. Then some people decide to build framework that will contains all in one, but be flexible enough to use it in different applications. So Unitils was born. To help developers with mapping guidelines to the framework there are tutorial and cookbook both published on the Unitils web site.

Unitils supports JUnit3, JUnit4 and TestNG and contains following modules:

- Spring module (for loading application contexts and retrieving and injecting Spring beans)
- Hibernate module (Hibernate configuration support and automatic database mapping checking)
- DbUnit module (test data management using DbUnit)
- Database module (unit-test database maintenance and connection pooling)
- EasyMock module (for creating mocks and lenient reflection argument matching)
- Inject module (for injecting (mock) objects into other objects)

Unitils configuration is very flexible and very small (if you are satisfied with default behavior). You can select any modules for your application and don't use others. Unitils work is based on annotations, so you will not need additional configuration files like except general settings file. Also Unitils provide to developers very useful assertion utilities, that based on reflection and support different modes for asserts.

Unitils has modular architecture so you can easy write your own modules to extend existing functionality. It is open source project so your modules may be included in future releases. General Maven repository contains last version of the framework so those of you who use Maven will not need manually install it. One important part is missed in Unitils - mocks for Java 'native' technologies like Servlets, JSP, JNDI and etc. I use a part of Spring framework (spring-test) for this purpose and it makes job very well.

From June 25, 2008 Unitils 1.1 became available. This release includes support of JPA, Spring transactions and complex database scripts structure. Also many integration bugs was fixed for database module.

I don't want to include examples for Unitils usage, you can find them in the tutorial or cookbook with detailed descriptions. Also there is useful video presentation with concrete samples. Make your tests better and your application code will be better. Develop with pleasure!