Apache Jakarta and Beyond: A Java Programmer’s Introduction

Chapter 6. Further Web Testing with Jakarta Cactus

Testing with HTTPUnit is a great way to simulate a user’s perspective of a Web application. However, such testing often does not give a complete picture of what is happening within the system. HTTPUnit can report that a page did not function as expected but can give no direct clues as to why it failed. Such failures may be be directly attributable to incorrect HTML, but more often failures have their origins in code within a servlet or scoped bean.

This is one of the motivations behind Cactus, another testing suite that is built on top of JUnit.

An Introduction to Cactus

When testing a Web application with HTTPUnit the testing code sits entirely outside the server being tested. The only interaction ...