The four of us recently visited the Confess, CONference For Enterprise Software Solutions, in Vienna. It was located at the Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center which was a nice place for the conference. Here’s a summary of some of the sessions during the conference. Couchbase – Michael Nitschinger Michael gave an overview of Couchbase and in particular the new features of the 2.0 version. Couchbase combines the features of an in-memory data grid and a document database with secondary…

REST Assured is a framework for easy testing of REST or HTTP services in Java and has recently reached version 1.8. The internals of REST Assured have undergone a major refactoring to allow JsonPath and XmlPath to be extracted to their own projects. This allows you to use these projects without depending on REST Assured itself. What does this mean and how can you benefit? Read on! Parsing documents with Groovy GPath Groovy has a very simple and elegant way…

A while ago we decided to upgrade Jackson from 1.x to 2.x (faster jackson). We were also using JAXB to map Java objects to JSON and Jersey for exposing our REST services and of course we wanted to retain those after the Jackson upgrade. The process is really quite easy once you’ve figured things out. Maven dependencies Before the update we depended on the following Jackson artifacts in Maven: Where the jackson.version property was equal to 1.9.11. All of these…

Three of us recently visited Scandinavian Developer Conference in Gothenburg. Being backend developers we liked the Big Data track the most, but we also managed to see some good presentations about collaboration and web technology.

PowerMock is a Java framework that allows you to for example mock static and final methods, final classes and construction of new objects. PowerMock is thus a powerful framework and it’s quite easy to misuse it unless you know what you’re doing. What I’ve seen time and again is that people are using mocking when what they probably should be doing is stubbing. With all the powerful features in PowerMock it can easily lead to complicated and hard-to-maintain test code….

Yesterday we wrote some integration tests using the REST Assured framework to verify URL authorization for our web application configured with Spring Security. Spring Security is configured to redirect the user to a login page if he or she is not yet logged in. It does this by sending a HTTP response with status code 302 and the URL to the login page specified in the location header. This is all fine and our tests verified that we were indeed…

I’ve recently switched from Linux to Mac OS X and I’m trying to get used to the new environment. One of the differences from Linux is the way to find the process id (pid) listening on a specific port. In Linux you do like this: to show the pid listening on port 8080. On Max OS X how ever you’ll run into the following error message: The way to find the pid on the Mac is to do like this:…

For me unit testing Javascript has been an issue for quite a while. Our backend server usually have a lot of tests at various levels but the Javascript service and view layers have been more or less neglected in terms of automated tests. Using Selenium is one option but if your UI is subject to frequent changes Selenium tests can be quite cumbersome and time consuming to use and maintain. So without any automated tests for the Javascript code you…

In my current project we’re migrating our existing entity model to MongoDB and have turned to Morphia for mapping our Java objects to and from its MongoDB representation. Our Java entities are immutable and preferably we’d like to keep it that way. Morphia, like most other mapping frameworks, require us to have a default constructor but it doesn’t require it to be public. So a work-around would be to have a private constructor that’s used only by Morphia: It’s quite…

Mocking is a well-known and estabilished concept in our field of work as developers. There are a lot of frameworks for creating and setting up expectations on mock objects in all kinds of different languages. For me as a Java developer my introduction with mocking was through the EasyMock project. Due to the techincal limitations of this and other frameworks at the time me and a colleague founded PowerMock to make it possible to mock things such as new instance…

A couple of days ago we ran into the infamous “too many open files” when our Tomcat web server was under load. There are several blogs around the internet that tries to deal with this issue but none of them seemed to do the trick for us. Usually what you do is to set the ulimit to a greater value (it’s something like 1024 by default). But in order to make it permanent after reboot the first thing suggested is…

In this blog I’m going to demonstrate how to parse and validate more complex JSON and XML documents in Java using the REST Assured framework and the XmlPath and JsonPath components available in this framework. Since REST Assured is implemented in Groovy it can be really beneficial to take advantage of Groovy’s collection API. Let’s begin by looking at an example in Groovy: At the first line we simply define a list with some words but the second line is…

From a client perspective it has always seemed to me that uploading a large file or stream to a server using multi-part form data encoding in Java is overly complex. To address this I implemented support for it in REST Assured 1.3. Example Let’s say you have a simple HTML page that performs file-uploading from a browser like this: We also assume that we have a server that receives the file and return a JSON response like this if everything…

A couple of months ago I introduced a new open source Java framework for simple automated testing of REST/HTTP services called REST Assured. A lot of things have happended to the framework since then and it’s now better than ever. In this blog I’m going to summarize some of the most important new features that have been added since the last blog post. Easy parsing of the response body JSON Let’s assume that a REST service at localhost:8080/json returns: As…

A while ago I blogged about how to use the PowerMock Rule to bootstrap PowerMock without using a JUnit runner. A problem that you’ll likely run into sooner or later when using this approach in an integration test is the need to ignore certain classes or packages from being loaded by the PowerMock classloader using the @PowerMockIgnore annotation. This is actually not limited to the Rule but happens when using the standard JUnit runner as well but it’s much more…

Currently PowerMock builds on top of EasyMock and Mockito to provide mocking of e.g. static methods and final classes using a familiar API. What most people don’t know is that it’s pretty easy to benefit from PowerMock even for frameworks it doesn’t support. JMock is another popular mocking framework that PowerMock currently doesn’t support but this article will demonstrate some examples of JMock and PowerMock. Mocking final classes Unlike EasyMock and Mockito, JMock doesn’t support mocking classes out of the…

I quite often get the question if PowerMock can be used together with Spring integration testing or other frameworks that require a JUnit runner to bootstrap. The answer up until now has been somewhat ambiguous. The reason is that for the last year or so we’ve been working with a new way of bootstrapping PowerMock that uses a JUnit Rule instead of a JUnit runner. Implementing this rule proved to be quite hard since it required deep-cloning of an entire…

Testing and validating REST services in Java is harder than in dynamic languages such as Ruby and Groovy. REST Assured is a Java DSL (built on top of HTTP Builder) that brings the simplicity of these languages into the Java domain. Example 1 – JSON Assume that a GET request to http://localhost:8080/lotto returns JSON as: REST assured can then help you to easily make the GET request and verify the response. E.g. if you want to verify that lottoId is…

Awaitility is a Java based DSL that allows you to easily setup expectations for asynchronous code (if you’re new to Awaitility you can read an introduction here). Version 1.3 has just been released with a couple of new interesting features. Scala support First of all we now have support for Scala! This means that you can write your Awaitility code like this: What you actually provide is a no argument function that returns a scala.Boolean. To make this work you…

Introduction Testing asynchronous systems is hard. Not only does it require handling threads, timeouts and concurrency issues, but the intent of the test code can be obscured by all these details. Awaility is a DSL that allows you to express expectations of a asynchronous system in a concise and easy to read manner. Simple example So let’s assume that we send an “add user” message to our asynchronous system like this: In your test case Awaitility can help you to…