Testing the Web Tier, Part 2

JUnit is more than a Java testing tool – it is a testing framework that can be extended to test non-Java resources as well. In the first presentation in this series, we examined three JUnit extensions that allow you to functionally test your website. In this talk, we'll look at three more tools that web developers should have in their toolkit: JsUnit, DbUnit, and the W3C Markup Validation Service.

JsUnit allows you to test your JavaScript. Anyone who has done JavaScript development knows that cross-browser support of JavaScript is a tricky proposition. Rather than emulating a specific browser, JsUnit can literally launch different browsers and execute the test suite to ensure that the JavaScript code you wrote actually works.

DbUnit allows you to stage your database tables for unit testing purposes. You can insert and delete information as a part of your test suite. While the database isn't technically a part of the web tier, we'll show how the proper use of this tool allows you to test the other parts of the web tier with ease.

HTML compliance is difficult if not impossible to see just by looking at raw HTML. Browsers are reasonably permissive in terms of the HTML they'll render, but writing valid HTML ensures the widest possible audience for your site. We'll show you how to incorporate this free online service with JUnit.

About Scott Davis

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

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