Selenium talk at SF JUG

I attended another great San Francisco JUG meeting tonight, this time on How to use Selenium with Maven/Ant to automate testing of web apps.

The talk was given by Chris Bedford, from Build Lackey Labs – “Automating the Monkey Work Out and the Quality In!”. Overall, I thought this was a great talk by Chris. He clearly has a huge amount of experience creating automated tests and integrating them with build tools and he gave a well structured, interesting, well delivered presentation. I have posted a copy of Chris’s slides and I think the video will be posted on the SF JUG site at some point, but I have also posted my notes from the presentation below…
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Tags: JUG, q, selenium, sfjug, Testing, unittesting

Running Hibernate unit tests with Maven

I recently converted a project I have been working on to use Maven. After setting up all the dependencies in the pom, I got everything compiling fine but ran into problems getting the unit tests to pick up the hibernate config (hibernate.cfg.xml) and hibernate mapping (*.hbm.xml) files. With hindsight, it is straightforward, but it took me a while to figure it out so I thought I’d post the solution here.

Initially, I had my hibernate.cfg.xml file in the following directory

my-app/src/main/java

And when I first tried to run my hibernate unit tests (mvn test), I got this error:

SessionFactory creation failed.org.hibernate.HibernateException: /hibernate.cfg.xml not found

Some checking of the maven docs and some forums revealed the following possible solutions:
1) Copy the hibernate.cfg.xml file to

my-app/target/classes

This works, however I think it is a hack as the target folder is generated rather than being somewhere you should actually manually create files.
2) The next solution I found suggested moving the hibernate.cfg.xml to

my-app/src/main/resources

This works well as the contents of this folder are copied to the base level of the my-app/target/classes folder so it is basically a ‘more correct’ solution than the first.
3) The next and I think best solution was to create a new, duplicate hibernate.cfg.xml inside

my-app/src/test/resources

This allows a different hibernate.cfg.xml file to be used for testing and, for example, facilitates connecting to a different database (such as hsqldb) for testing while continuing to use your regular database (such as MySQL) for the app itself.

A couple of points to note:

1) The hibernate mapping files (i.e. the *.hbm.xml files) should also be in the resources folder (in whatever directory structure you choose) to ensure that these too are accessible by the unit tests.

2) I am not (yet) using Spring with the hibernate components, which would likely have changed the above setup.

Refs/links

http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/index.html#How_do_I_add_resources_to_my_JAR

http://www.mail-archive.com/users@maven.apache.org/msg54720.html

Tags: Hibernate, Maven, Testing

Silicon Valley Code Camp Notes

I am at the Silicon Valley Code Camp at the moment.

I will try to post some notes on the various talks I attend below…

Day 1:

• Session 1: JavaScript
• Session 2: Easing into Agile
• Session 3: Building Better Tests in Java
• Session 4: What is Python?

Day 2:

• Session 1: Basics of Threading
• Session 2: Introduction to Grails

Tags: agile, codecamp, Java, JavaScript, python, Testing, threading

FindBugs

Came across this really neat tool that can actually find bugs in your code. It uses ‘static analysis’ to find instances of bug patterns – code instances that are likely to be errors. I was pretty skeptical until I ran it on some code and was impressed by the results. It found loads of possible problems. I’ll definitely be using it again.

Check it out at http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

Update: Found recommendations for another tool called JLint, which is supposed to be particularly good for spotting potential deadlocks so perhaps worth using when testing threaded code.

Tags: Testing