Integration testing: building our own test sandbox (theory)

To be honest, I aim for developing high-quality software. Unit tests, now BDD really helps with that. They allow us to test individual classes, modules, and event subsystems. But what about testing whole application with everything in place (integration testing)? Mostly, this is test teams responsibility. Before that, can developers be sure that application is not only built properly but foremost flows work properly as well? Sometimes it's not so obvious, but in general the answer is "yes".

Today I would like to share my own experience with building test sandbox for Axis 2 Web Services. Primarily, I tried to avoid any external dependencies (such as database, servers, etc.). Test sandbox should be fully reproducible and isolated.

Application architecture looks like in picture below.











So, our test sandbox should have:
- HTTP Server (and Servlet container) -> Jetty
- Database (in memory) -> HSQLDB

The flow to start up test sandbox looks like:
- Configure HSQLDB data source and JNDI
- Configure Hibernate
- Configure Web Services for Jetty
- Run Jetty
- Export database schema (Hibernate)
- Prepare test dataset (DbUnit)
- Run test(s) (Java or Groovy)

Also, using AspectJ weaver, we can reconfigure Hibernate with HSQLDB data source on the fly. It looks a little bit complicated but completely feasible. So, from theory to code ... (next post)