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Chapter 13. Testing a Struts Application with StrutsTestCase

Introduction

In this chapter, we will look at tools that can improve test quality and efficiency when you are working with Struts applications.

Struts is a popular, widely used and well-documented J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application framework with a long history and an active user community. It is based on a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which separates an application into (at least) three distinct layers. The Model represents the application business layer, the View represents the presentation layer (in other words, the screens), and the Controller represents the navigational logic, that binds the screens to the business layer. In Struts, the Controller layer is primarily implemented by Action classes, which we will see a lot more of later in this chapter.

Testing user interfaces has always been one of the trickiest parts of testing a web application, and testing Struts user interfaces is no exception to this rule. If you are working on a Struts application, StrutsTestCase is a powerful and easy-to-use testing framework that can make your life a lot easier. Using Struts and then StrutsTestCase, in combination with traditional JUnit tests, will give you a very high level of test coverage and increase your product reliability accordingly.

Note that StrutsTestCase does not let you test the HTML or JSP parts of your user interface: you need a tool such as Selenium for that (see Testing Your Web ...