Jetty as a test-suite decorator
9 Jul, 2004
Marty Andrews and I have been working on a small project together. It's primarily intended as a demo of continuous integration, but has also given us the opportunity to play with some new technologies/ideas.
One of the coolest tricks we picked up (from Cactus) was to start/stop a web-server as part of running the tests, rather than depending on having one running already.
(In the past I've typically written Ant scripts that dump a WAR-file in a magic directory, and wait "a bit" for the server to auto-deploy it, before running my HTTP-based acceptance-tests. This is way nicer.)
The key is a test decorator that starts Jetty to serve our web-app:
package com.thoughtworks.todolist;
import junit.extensions.TestSetup;
import junit.framework.Test;
import org.mortbay.jetty.Server;
import org.mortbay.util.InetAddrPort;
public class JettyTestSetup extends TestSetup {
private Server _server;
public JettyTestSetup(Test test) {
super(test);
}
protected void setUp() throws Exception {
_server = new Server();
_server.addListener(new InetAddrPort(9999));
_server.addWebApplication(
"/todolist", "build/todolist.war"
);
_server.start();
}
protected void tearDown() throws Exception {
_server.stop();
_server = null;
}
}
As you can see, it's not hard to get a Jetty server going. Jetty is nice and lightweight, too: it's small (less than 600k), and starts up fast (less than a second here).
Now, it's a simple matter to decorate our test-suite with JettyTestSetup:
public class AllAcceptanceTests {
public static Test suite() throws Exception {
TestSuite suite = new TestSuite();
suite.addTestSuite(ViewListTest.class);
suite.addTestSuite(AddItemTest.class);
// ... etc ...
return new JettyTestSetup(suite);
}
}
That's it. The server gets started at the beginning of the suite, and stopped afterward.
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